PTC Technical Support eNews & Alerts

[TomU]

Has something changed with the daily support emails?  I haven't received any since last week Friday.  I just double checked and my subscription is still enabled and there is nothing in my spam or junk email folders.

[Marco_Tosin]

I received my last email monday.

[Marco_Tosin]

Just received an email with 190 topics.

[PeterCase · Accepted solution]

Hello @Marco_Tosin and @TomU ,

Our servers which run the crons which populate and execute the queues for these outbound mails were backed up. After seeing your post I contacted the systems team who restarted the services.

We're monitoring for ongoing stability at the moment, and other customers will also receive larger than expected notification digests, due to the gap.

Sorry for the inconvenience,

Peter.

[TomU]

I normally receive these support emails at 10 AM.  It's almost 11:30 and still nothing.  I'll let you know if/when they start appearing again.

[BenLoosli]

I got mine at 1:00PM with 83 items. First one since Monday.

[TomU]

Finally!  Just got my first email for the week at 3:01 PM today.  Better late than never!  😊

[BenLoosli]

Are the servers clogged again? The last one I received was on Monday.

[TomU]

Same here...

[PeterCase]

Hi @BenLoosli and @TomU , 

This issue is on our side. We needed to temporarily suspend eNews and Alerts earlier today after discovering an issue with a job we ran last Friday which modified the "last updated" date on all articles.

Your first digest email after Friday would likely have contained 100s, possibly 1000s of inaccurate "article updated" notifications.

To protect the inboxes of subscribers who receive their digests today, tomorrow and Friday, we've stopped the outbound stream and aim to restore asap, once we've addressed the underlying data issue.

All customers who received an unexpectedly long list of updates will soon receive an email to explain. 

Thanks for your patience while we work on this, 

Peter.       

[TomU]

Thanks for the update!  I'd definitely prefer to not re-read thousand of articles marked as new.  🙂

[TomU]

@PeterCase, could we get an update on this restore process?  It's been more than two weeks and still no new articles.  Thanks!

[TomU]

For anyone else monitoring this, I did receive a full "eNews and Alerts" email today!  🙂

[Chris3]

I did not get one this morning. I will wait another day ... maybe they are still backed up.

[Chris3]

I received one again this morning.

[PeterCase]

Hi @TomU and @Chris3, 

Yes, we re-enabled the subscription emails on Tuesday and our crons worked through the backlog into Wednesday. Normal service should now be restored and users should not see long lists of articles modified on August 6th. This being said, we are still working through correcting the "last-modified" issue on the articles themselves, which is still having an impact on Search ranking. The end result will be better for us all, as it will be a more accurate representation of when the article had an actual content modification. Once the fix is ready, we'll apply it retroactively on all articles.

Have a great weekend, 

Peter.  

[TomU]

@PeterCase,

Thanks for the update.  Once they started flowing again last week the content and volume seemed fairly normal.  Beyond just improving the 'last modified' date, it would be really helpful if the articles could somehow indicate *what changed*.  On longer, multi-page articles it is virtually impossible to figure out what has changed each time they are updated.  Thanks.

[Marco_Tosin]

+1

[Pierre_M]

@TomU , @Marco_Tosin  can one of you open an idea in the "PTC eSupport Help ideas" section to talk about this and see if/how we could make it happen ? I'm interested in the level of information that you would need to make it useful. Thx

[TomU]

Done.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-eSupport-Help-Ideas/Highlight-Changes-to-KB-Articles/idi-p/746337#M142