How to Remove NO AUTO CREATE USER and Fix Sendy Error

I was getting an error when getting ready to send a campaign in Sendy. The error said something along the lines that I needed to remove ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY from MySQL. I don’t have a screenshot anymore since I fixed the issue but it displayed with some red text in the Newsletter preview above the “Test send this campaign” text.

This issue can be described as disabling MySQL strict mode WHM account

Now, I don’t know about you but I’m not a whizz at MySQL commands and all that. So I started doing some research to help resolve this issue.

I started with the actual suggestion by Sendy, they include a link to how another user was able to resolve this, however, that wasn’t much help in my case because my setup was a little different. So this is what I did to fix it.

I had to log in to WHM with a root account. This is usually the account that has access to pretty much everything when you have VPS hosting.

Once I logged in I searched for Terminal, which gives you that DOS-like black screen to enter commands.

I then typed this:

select @@sql_mode;

This showed something like this:

ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

I then entered the following command to take me to the my.cnf directory to modify:

nano /etc/my.cnf

In this directory I entered the following in the last line:
(notice that I removed “ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY,” including the comma, and I also added “sql_mode=” in the beginning)

sql_mode=STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

Once I did this I did CTRL+O to save the new settings.

Then CTRL+X to exit.

And finally, I restarted MySQL with this command:

service mysqld restart

After this was done, I refreshed my Sendy window, and the dreaded error disappeared, and problem fixed.

By the way, I send most of my email newsletters with Sendy. All those other email services out there were sucking me dry with their high fees every single month. When I learned about Sendy I immediately set my own up and never looked back ever since. You can learn more about Sendy here.