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  1. Moodle
  2. MDL-65655

Forum mailings and maintenance jobs fails with "Suspended account" exception

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    Description

      Synopsis

      This has been originally reported as a problem on moodle.org after the site was upgraded to 3.7. Moodle stopped sending email notifications to users subscribed to the site forums. Running the task manually led to a failure:

      $ sudo -u www-data php admin/tool/task/cli/schedule_task.php --execute='\mod_forum\task\cron_task'
      [PID 13107] Execute scheduled task: Forum mailings and maintenance jobs (mod_forum\task\cron_task)
      [PID 13107] Removing old digest records from 7 days ago.
      [PID 13107] Removed all old digest records.
      [PID 13107] Fetching unmailed posts.
      [PID 13107] Done
      [PID 13107] Processing post information
      [PID 13107] Processed 148 posts
      [PID 13107] Filling caches
      [PID 13107]   Filling course cache
      [PID 13107]   Done
      [PID 13107]   Filling forum cache
      [PID 13107]   Done
      [PID 13107]   Filling discussion cache
      [PID 13107]   Done
      [PID 13107]   Filling user subscription cache
      [PID 13107]   Done
      [PID 13107]   Filling digest cache
      [PID 13107]   Done
      [PID 13107] All caches filled
      [PID 13107] Queueing user tasks.
      [PID 13107]   Processing 6563 users
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 5 messages for 1174932
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 51 messages for 12568
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 18 messages for 1180476
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 23 messages for 1244321
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 2628319
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 553043
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 965252
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 1070092
      [PID 13107]     Queued 1 digests and 0 messages for 63444
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 2227622
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 18 messages for 15479
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 26 messages for 827446
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 23 messages for 391245
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 1818686
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 29 messages for 276376
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 18 messages for 1146882
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 1795164
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 120894
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 2637212
      [PID 13107]     Queued 1 digests and 0 messages for 200812
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 3 messages for 890398
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 1191309
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 8 messages for 150934
      [PID 13107]     Queued 1 digests and 0 messages for 429480
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 22 messages for 245443
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 2597442
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 2177440
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 1391647
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 109588
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 20 messages for 1199631
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 2050058
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 3 messages for 843546
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 2643385
      [PID 13107]     Queued 0 digests and 0 messages for 1964410
      [PID 13107] ... used 293 dbqueries
      [PID 13107] ... used 2.4785959720612 seconds
      [PID 13107] Scheduled task failed: Forum mailings and maintenance jobs (mod_forum\task\cron_task),Suspended account
      

      Analysis of the problem

      • The reason for this is that the new forum cron code attempts to create adhoc delivery jobs for users who have been inactivated.
      • If such users had subscribed before they were inactivated, they are returned by the method mod_forum\subscriptions\fetch_subscribed_users()
      • Later in the processing chain, we attempt to queue an adhoc task to be run as the given user (making use of the MDL-59084 feature): We call mod_forum\task\cron_task\queue_user_tasks() which in turn calls core\task\manager::queue_adhoc_task()
      • In the core\task\manager::queue_adhoc_task() there is an input check that the adhoc task's user is an active one: core_user::require_active_user() which fails and throws the said exception in two not-covered cases:

                if ($checksuspended and $user->suspended) {
                    throw new moodle_exception('suspended', 'auth');
                }
         
                if ($checknologin and $user->auth == 'nologin') {
                    throw new moodle_exception('suspended', 'auth');
                }
        

      Solution

      We need to make sure that mod_forum\subscriptions\fetch_subscribed_users() does not include users that would be later detected as inactive.

      Steps to reproduce

      1. Apply the submitted patch
      2. Undo the changes of the file mod/forum/classes/subscriptions.php
      3. Run the mod/forum/tests/mail_test.php unit tests

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              mudrd8mz David Mudrák (@mudrd8mz)
              mudrd8mz David Mudrák (@mudrd8mz)
              Andrew Lyons Andrew Lyons
              Adrian Greeve Adrian Greeve
              CiBoT CiBoT
              Adrian Greeve, Ilya Tregubov, Kevin Percy, Mathew May, Mihail Geshoski, Shamim Rezaie, David Woloszyn, Huong Nguyen, Jake Dallimore, Meirza, Michael Hawkins, Raquel Ortega, Safat Shahin, Stevani Andolo
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              1 Vote for this issue
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              4 Start watching this issue

              Dates

                Created:
                Updated:
                Resolved:
                8/Jul/19

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