1 - Deactivate all 3rd-party plugins and check again

2 - Try to activate the bundled 'Developer Tools' plugin.

Go to 'Developer Tools' plugin's settings on '/admin/developers/settings'.

Select 'Warning' in the 'Trace level' option.

Enable 'Error error log' option.

Now you will see error logs on the 'Error log' page at the /admin/develop_tools/error_log

Thank you Nikolai. Plugin "Check for plugin updates" was hanging my site.

The likes action on the river applies to the 'entity' about which the river item was create.

So if a user has a new avatar that would be the user. If a new blog was created it would be the blog.

Since we decided it wasn't logical to have Likes enabled on users and groups there is no Like action on the river activity for these kinds of entities.

Also you (in the Elgg datamodel) can't like a river activity only the subject of the activity. So Liking a new avatar would be the same as Liking that that user joined a group. Therefor if you Liked the new avatar you'd also liked the group join. This isn't what a user would expect.

Hope this explains why it's not possible.

Because of the limitations of activity items they maybe should be upgrade to be entities. That allows liking them for instance. This idea has been mentioned earlier here: https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg/issues/10591

That issue/mention is 5 years old (not that early), what happened?

I know Elgg is a framework and we as developers need to create things with it, but I also think Elgg is more than just a social networking framework, at least could be more.

The majority of users of Elgg use it as it is, as a social networking platform not framework, that's why you guys created so many plugins and added so much features to core...maybe it's time to push even more features...just a friendly suggestion.

I'm just a web designer and soon to be a web developer, I really want to be able to help with this project, but will take time, like your time, which is most important, and not to mention working for free, but it's not impossible.

Thank you very much for building such and amazing platform!! I will dedicate my spare time learning more about php and Elgg to help you guys make Elgg even better. You probably heard these words before...but a scorpio keeps his word...mostly :))

Just felt the need to deviate a bit...sorry!

When using SMTP you would have to uncomment and change

//$CONFIG->emailer_transport = 'sendmail';

to

$CONFIG->emailer_transport = 'smtp';

I think it won't use SMTP otherwise at all regardless what you have set in the $CONFIG->emailer_smtp_settings array. As for the values in the array are you using the very same you have used with the plugin before on the older Elgg version? Connection class might be 'plain' instead of 'login'. And you might also have to define 'ssl' and 'port' (twice?) depending what the smtp mail server requires. I never tried SMTP myself so I can't give any other first hand advice.

As for sendmail it shouldn't be necessary to make any settings at all as long as sendmail it correctly set up on your server. If the test works as explained in the docs but no email notifications are sent on site I wonder if you use an email address as site email that's not matching your domain. In this case sendmail might block it (as anti-spam measure). There's also the question if the receiver of the email notification has enabled emails as allowed notification method in his notification settings. In case of verification emails the question is if the email goes out but gets blocked somewhere on the way to the receiver or ends in the spam folder of the receiver.

Well, I managed to get sendmail to work. I probably had messed up some comment line.

But out of curiosity, I tried every SMTP setting I could and didn't get it to work. 'plain' and 'login'; ssl and not ssl; different ports etc.

also tried different combinations of uncommenting/changing the $CONFIG->emailer_transport = 'smtp';
and $CONFIG->emailer_sendmail_settings = '';

Anyways, sendmail is working now. Thank you!

To answer your question I believe it's Elgg 3.3.

However since MySQL 5.6 has reached End-of-life on Feb 1 2021 maybe GoDaddy should update to supported software.

• https://www.mysql.com/support/eol-notice.html (search for mysql 5.6)
• https://endoflife.software/applications/databases/mysql

Thanks a lot, Jerome, for your very fast and helpful reply.  I appreciate it.

Yes, GoDaddy dropped the ball on this one as the biggest hosting provider in the world.  MySQL version 5.7 was released on 21st October, 2015 and you're right that version 5.6 has not been supported since February, 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#Release_history