Hey everyone, just wanted to let everyone know that the completed order emails with the tracking information issue from last week have been resolved and the site is operating as normal. Customers should now continue to be getting emails with their tracking numbers as their orders are complete and shipped.
If you had an order during this time period, we sent the tracking order manually as they were shipped. If you didn’t get one, please feel free to contact us. You can check if your order has been shipped and where it is in the queue with our Order Status page.
Customers with order numbers 39363 and higher, or orders placed after April 28th, should see the tracking numbers emailed as normal automatically.
Thank you everyone for their patience, we’re glad this has now been resolved.
So what happened exactly
It appears that starting from April 14th, completed order emails for some orders (specifically for the ones that are for LongMill MK2s) were not being sent. We were not aware of the issue until we returned from our long Easter weekend. Our current system has been set up to send emails in several different stages:
- When we receive your order: an email is sent to the customer when the order has been created and successfully paid for. If there is an issue with your payment you will get a different email to notify you.
- When we complete and ship your order: an email is sent when the order is ready for pick up (which comes with instructions and times that your order can be picked up) or has been shipped (which comes with tracking info as well as additional info about duties and taxes).
In some cases, there may be additional emails, such as for software licenses and if we need to notify you of packing status.
At first, we checked the status of different plugins of the site, as updates were done on different areas to see if there were any changes to the site between the 14th and 18th. However, there were no changes to the plugins during this time, and reverting back to older versions of the plugins for testing did not fix the issue.
First, we received some error notifications from the site, citing some issues with the software license system. However, the issue was still not fixed after testing with the system disabled and rolled back.
Next, we also started receiving error notifications in parsing code in the code used to generate the emails. At first glance, the HTML was correct and was code that had been used previously for a long time. However, we found that the PHP version was updated on April 14th, which may be causing issues with parsing HTML in this case. Removing this code has fixed this issue, and the emails are now being sent without the parsing error.
We have reverted the email to the same format as previously through another method for customizing emails, which we expect will help keep the system working in future updates.