Users denied access when trying to unsubscrbie

[ed]

I'm getting noticeably more complaints about users not being able to unsubscribe to email notifications for content or comment alerts and/or the newsletter.

The emerging pattern is that they are clicking on the unsubscribe link in their email alerts and going to an access denied page.

My sense says there's something in https/http? Or them not being logged in?

Something is definitely going on.

Adding this to Sam to pick up in January. SAM - tickets like this can bounce around the tech team a bit - stay on it!

[sam]

Hi I have had a couple more reports of this happening.

I also had a 'access denied' when logging in. I had successfully logged in. See attached image​http://i.imgur.com/UhSr6sD.png

Any idea's Paul?

Thanks

Sam

[paul]

Hi Sam,

Were you redirected back to the user/login page after you logged in?

After I logged in I was redirected to my profile page /users/paulbooker, and if then tried to manually go back to the the /user/login I then correctly get the access denied page.

The emerging pattern is that they are clicking on the unsubscribe link in their email alerts and going to an access denied page.

I'll look into this over the weekend. If the user needs to be logged in to unsubscribe then access denied is correct, although not very helpful to the user.

[sam]

Just spotted we could change a setting here:

​https://www.transitionnetwork.org/admin/messaging/notifications/subscriptions

From the current unsubscribe setting:
Confirmation form. Links take the user through a confirmation form with some more options.

To:
Direct operation. Links create/delete a subscription without confirmation using default settings.

I can't think why this would be problematic? It might fix/workaround the issue.

What do you reckon Ed? Shall I try it?

Thanks

Sam

[ed]

Sam that sounds like a workaround that will avoid the irriation for users but not probably the most usable thing to do. Worth a try I reckon unless Paul says no.

[paul]

I think to avoid the problem of the the user seeing an "access denied" page when they follow the link in the email, back to the site -- this probably only happens when a user is logged out -- we could make the quick change that Sam suggested and "maybe" later look at providing a better notice to the user that they need to login, ..

The notification permissions look correct:
​https://www.transitionnetwork.org/admin/user/permissions#module-notifications

[ed]

Cool - do it SAM!

[sam]

Done, I'll close the ticket but open it again if anyone else complains..

[sam]

Sadly that didn't seem to work. This came in today:

"I've tried a few times to unsubscribe from Transition emails (don't have time
for reading them just now). However it always says access denied either with
or without my log in. Could you please unsubscribe me?"

[ed]

Sam you're unsubbing them anyway, right?

[sam]

Of course :)

[paul]

Sorry , this has completely fallen of my radar. It sounds like the user could have really helped us to resolve the problem. Did they provide the unsubscribe link in their email correspondence?

Thanks, Paul

[paul]

I'll try and reproduce the problem ..

[paul]

I have created a new test account & subscribed to the Transition Network newsletter. I'll try to unsubscribe when I get the newsletter.