Hello Everyone,

We have noted this and passed it to our developers and will provide you with an update on this as soon as possible.

We appreciate your patience.

Hello Everyone,

Can you please test it out now and let me know if it works or not?

Looking forward to your reply.

Hello,

This was a global SSL issue that was also affecting us.

Now it has been resolved and should not reoccur.

Please let us know if you have any other questions by opening another ticket as we are still waiting for Michael's confirmation.

Hello @Jonah,

Our developers isolated the issue - it was an SSL Certificate issue which happened on our Amelia SMS Server.

This is the first time it happened, and now when our developers fixed it, so we are confident that it should never happen again.

@Michael :

But we did have an issue like this when a user is not able to log in( unrelated to what now happened / the SSL issue on our Server)

for some specific users who had an issue coming from our SMS Server being blocked/black or gray listed on their Hosting Firewall; we can advise what you can check for that, if it might be the case on your Site.

First of all please check if you are using the latest version of Amelia 7.3.

If not, please update it.

If you activated the purchase code in Amelia Settings/Activation, the update should be offered in the Plugins section. On some WordPress installations, you need to deactivate the plugin first in order to see the update offered, so please try that.

If that doesn't work, try going through Dashboard/Updates. 

See if you can update the plugin through there, and if that doesn't work either, you can follow the manual update procedures in the article linked below:

Updating the plugin to the latest version

After that, please try sending an SMS Test from Amelia to your number to send a test notification to check if it worked or not.

Please note: SMS often has a status queued but is actually sent.

It is not refreshed automatically. 

You have to press the little refresh icon next to the "queued" status, to see the actual message status.

If it does not work, can you please reach out to the DevOps of your server (or reach out to your hosting provider, and ask them to ask the DevOps) if they can ping our server?

ping smsapi.wpamelia.com

Also, have them make sure to whitelist this IP address: 116.203.87.139

We look forward to your reply.

Thank you.

@Jonah,

I am not 100% sure if our SSL certificate expired, or if there was another type of a problem with it, at this time i can just confirm that our Developers quickly found out what the issue was as soon as they checked it, and they fixed it as quickly as they could.

They just told us that there was an issue with SSL on our Server, and they fixed it right away, we did not ask further details, to be honest with you at that time, what mattered for us is that it was fixed, and they told us it should not happen again, we have full confidence in our developers.

Due to the holiday break we had for New Years, we had slower responses in that time period.

Our Support did not work between Friday Evening and Wednesday, the 3rd of January.

"Now that I can see that the SSL is valid for 90 days its obvious that you are using AutoSSL. Is this something new or is this what failed everyone for days of time?

Can you please clarify if the use of autossl is new or if it was autossl that failed?"

We can confirm that the issue which happened was not allowing anyone to log in the Amelia SMS - so the Amelia SMS simply did not work at all for anyone during that issue.

- When it comes to more details in terms or the type of SSL we are using and what failed exactly, we are checking if we can provide you with all these details with our Developer Team.

As soon as they confirm this, we will report back to advise you on it.

"If it did in fact fail can you please confirm that someone will be around in 90 days, holiday or not, to make sure this does not happen again and if it does it will be down for minutes instead of days?

Some transparency here would really help."

I can assure you we are always 100% transparent with our Users, we are just not aware of these details yet exactly how our SSL is set.

This issue certainly never happened before.

As mentioned above, as soon as we get more details we will advise you.

-

When it comes to our availability during Holiday periods, we will check about that with our management and going to report back as soon as they advise on that, too.

Thank you for your patience.

Hello again, guys.

Just a follow-up for Jonah's questions in regards to more details about our Amelia SMS Server SSL issue and our future-proofing plan for it.

AutoSSL has been implemented, but the cause of its recent failure remains unclear. 

Our dedicated development team promptly addressed the issue by introducing robust monitoring.

 In the event of a future failure, we are well-prepared to swiftly renew and restore AutoSSL, minimizing any potential downtime to mere minutes.

While there is a chance of failure, particularly overnight, rest assured that our proactive approach ensures a timely resolution. Whether it occurs on a weekend, holiday, or during someone's vacation, we have a vigilant team ready to tackle any challenges promptly and efficiently.

Despite the team's confidence in the improvements made by our DevOps, who revamped the SMS feature and bolstered the system's resilience, we remain prepared for any unforeseen circumstances. 

Our commitment to quick response and resolution remains unwavering in the rare event of AutoSSL encountering issues.

We will proceed to assist Michael with the specific Site issue in private messages, and we will leave this information here as it is a public ticket.

Thank you.

Hi Michael,

My apology for a late reply, we also don't work on weekends which adds 2 more days.

-

You said : "Looks like text messages are only getting sent upon approval to the customers."

Can you please confirm are these Appointments having a default initial status as "pending" before they get "approved", and the Reminder / General Notifications are only sent when it changes to "approved"?

If you are trying to send any kind of Scheduled Message such as a "Day before Reminder" for a "pending" status, this is not possible.

The Reminder Message/notification can only be triggered for "Approved" Appointments.

Let me know if that is the case/ or if you are having different issues, that the Scheduled Messages are not sending for Approved Appointments?

-

Actually, i just logged in as Admin to check how you configured the Scheduled SMS Messages.

I notice you enabled/checked that the Reminder should be sent - but you do not have the WPCrontrol Plugin installed.

So can you show me where are you setting up the Cron Job, which is needed to 'trigger' the scheduled messages?

If you still did not configure any Cron Job on your Site, here are the instructions how to do this :

cron is a Linux utility that schedules a command or script on your server to run automatically at a specified time and date. A cron job is the scheduled task itself. Cron jobs can be very useful to automate repetitive tasks like in our plugin for notifications.

Depending on the server, there are different configurations for it, which you can contact your hosting provider about, or you can check out one of the solutions for it on this link.

Also, you can try this:

*/15 * * * * wget -q -O - "https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=wpamelia_api&call=/notifications/scheduled/send"

Or this:

*/15 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php ~/public_html/wp-cron.php --action='wpamelia_api' --call='/notifications/scheduled/send'

Or this:

GET 'https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=wpamelia_api&call=/notifications/scheduled/send' > /dev/null

WP Crontrol plugin is the best option if you're not familiar with cron jobs. You can find more info about it, and detailed instructions on how to set it up in our FAQ section.

So, if you already read that, and still need some clarification here's some further info.

You copy only the URL from below a scheduled notification:

Then, go to Tools/Cron Events, and click on the "Cron Schedules" tab. In it, add a 15-minute interval:

Then go back to the "Cron Events" tab and click on "Add new":

Below it, select the "PHP Cron event" radio button, and add the URL you copied from Amelia/Notifications in this form:

file_get_contents("yourURL");

Below it add the name and set it to run a few minutes in the future, using the provided time format. So, if you're adding the cron event at 12:45 (local, current time), set it to run at 12:50; and then select the schedule you previously selected:

Click on Add Event, and that's it.

The cron runs every 15 minutes and checks if there's an email to be sent. So, in Amelia Notifications, your scheduled notifications are set to run every day at a certain time. If you set that time to be 15:00 (for example), the emails will be sent when the cron runs after that time.

For example, there's an appointment booked for tomorrow, and it's currently 14:44 - the cron runs, but since it's not yet 15:00, it doesn't send anything. It runs again after 15 minutes, so at 14:59, but there are still no emails flagged by Amelia, so it doesn't send anything. Then it runs again at 15:14 and it sees there's an email that should've been sent at 15:00, so it sends the email. It will only send emails when Amelia sees an appointment scheduled for the next day.

I hope that helps.

Let me know if you still have any issue with Scheduled SMS Messages.

If that happens, please show me some screenshots how you tried to configure the Cron Job, is it via the Hosting Server directly or via WPCrontrol, etc, and we can remote in to check it out for you?

Just for safety, if you show any sensitive details, ensure to send it as a PRIVATE reply.

Thank you.

Hi Michael,

You're welcome.

1. If you ever decide to move back to WPCrontrol and give it another chance for any reason, we did see this issue before from a couple of other Users, they were not able to 'see' the PHP Cron option, here is what we advise, how you can fix that :

We can confirm that the process is still the same for WP Crontrol,

In case if you don't see the "PHP Event" radio option while making a new Cron Event in WP Crontrol.

Here is how it should look, a screenshot from our testing environment when adding a new Cron job:

You can take a look at this official WP Crontrol Page, in the FAQ section, find this question "which users can manage PHP cron events".

They mention a possible reason why users can't see the "PHP Event" radio button (the user you're logged in to WordPress with most likely doesn't have the 'edit_files' capability).

Please make sure you have the latest WP Crontrol version installed and go through the steps explained in their FAQ section, which is mentioned above.

Also, there's a possibility that a security plugin disallows file editing, which as a result hid that "PHP cron event" option selection in WP Crontrol. In iThemes Security there's a "Disable File Editor" option in settings, and that needs to be turned off as well. If you're using a different security plugin, look for a similar option, or reach out to that plugin's support team.

SiteGround Optimizer -> Frontend Optimization -> Javascript -> Defer Render-blocking JavaScript (uncheck).

2. But then again, as the saying says : "If it ain't broke, don't fix it";

So, if you managed to set up your Cron Job via the Get URL Cron and if your SMS messages are working without issues, then there is no need for WPCrontrol.

That being said, I am delighted to hear that this has been resolved! 

Thank you for letting us know what you did to resolve the SMS notifications in the end. 

Please don't hesitate to create new tickets for anything else we could assist with, we will always do our best to help as quickly as possible.

Thanks again.