Comment reply notifications sent to incorrect users

Impact

When notifications for new replies in comment threads are sent, they are sent to all users who have replied or commented anywhere on the site, rather than only in the relevant threads. This means that a user could listen in to new comment replies on pages they have not had editing access to, as long as they have left a comment or reply somewhere on the site.

Patches

A patched version has been released as Wagtail 2.15.2 (for the current LTS), which restores the intended behaviour - to send notifications for new replies to the participants in the active thread only (editing permissions are not considered).

Workarounds

New comments can be disabled by setting WAGTAILADMIN_COMMENTS_ENABLED = False in the Django settings file.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Ihor Marhitych for identifying this issue.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:

• Visit Wagtail's support channels
• Email us at security@wagtail.io (if you wish to send encrypted email, the public key ID is 0x6ba1e1a86e0f8ce8)