Does anyone know the answer to these questions regarding event RSVP emails?
If an RSVP is set to send a reminder email the day before, when does that email get sent? Is there a specific time each day that all reminders for the following day are sent?
If an event has a form attached for additional fields, does that additional field data get included in the reminder email?
We can test this, but it could take 24 hours for us to know the results of the test, so we were hoping someone knew.
We did a test to try to get some answers to these questions. Here is what we learned:
The reminder email came in at 9 a.m., so maybe that is when RSVP reminders are processed? Nothing definitive here.
The reminder email did NOT contain the additional field data, but it also did not contain any of the event details. I found info in the documentation though, and now know how to modify that reminder email if I need to.
Sure, happy to shed some light on your question about #1.
The function sendEventReminders gets run
hourly (as part of the core LW events_hourly process)
whenever an action changes the waitlist (i.e., folks newly off the waitlist need to be reminded)
Here’s what the function sendEventReminders does:
Scan every event that is Live, not canceled, starts in the next 48 hrs or ended in the last 48 hrs, and has either reminder or follow-up emails configured
If it’s an event with a follow-up who’s end time is >24hrs in the past, send the follow-up email to anyone who didn’t already receive it (And then flag each of them as having receievd it).
If it’s an event with a reminder who’s start time is <24hrs in the future, send the reminder email to anyone who didn’t already receive it (And then flag each of them as having receievd it).
So, the desired situation as it’s coded is: if you have a Thursday 5pm event with a reminder configured, most registrants should get the reminder around Wednesday at 5pm (the hourly cron job doesn’t run exactly on the hour, you can see the last time your events_hourly ran at /livewhale/?lw_debug=7).
Then, if someone registers later Wednesday night, they should still get the reminder email within the next ~hour when the next events_hourly runs. We thought a lot about how to handle this scenario when building this feature and decided that last-minute registrants receiving essentially a double-email (confirmation and then reminder) was an OK trade-off for the fact that we prevent them from missing any information. For example, if you’re using the reminder to convey important info like Survey URL or Zoom link that’s not in the confirmation.