email posts mod

[airmon]

I'm a member of a electric boating club on Yahoo, and all clubs are being migrated to "groups" at yahoo. I'm not sure I like that, especially the advertising.
  I started an alternate YaBBSE forum at www.eboat.org/forum and while some members are thrilled, many of the members don't wish to move, even with the speed and nice formatting of YaBBSE.
  The main reason seems to be that the list doesn't generate much traffic and rather than visit a forum on a regular basis they'd rather receive the posts via email. They'd prefer to reply via email too, if possible.

OK, I understand that YaBBSE is not a mail list program, and I realize what a server load a busy forum could put on a machine. We're not that busy - we average less than two posts a day on Yahoo and have about 300 users - and may never be.

Ideally, here's what I'd like to see, and I suspect there are others who run small forums that would like the same thing...

I'd like a mod that allows an administrator to allow/disallow users to receive an email whenever a post is made to any topic on the forum. ( a daily digest would be nice, but likely more work. I'd be happy with the an email for each post...)
  Users would then be able to check a box in their preferences to get these emails, otherwise they'd only get regular notify emails when requested.

 This email would contain the Category, board and topic as well as a link to the post for the user to visit the topic and reply. It would be nice if the link logged the user on, too, though the user could use "always stay logged in".  Attachments would not be sent.

Even better would be the ability of the user to  reply to the post via email, but once again I see how this could be more complicated and buggy. I'd be happy with a link.

In our case, if the forum got busy, we could turn this feature off, but for the forseeable future this would not be neccessary.
   
I've got a little PHP experience and I'm willing to help, though I don't think I can do this without assistance.

Any thoughts or anyone willing to take up this task?

Thanks for listening.

Airmon

[John R]

Notification via email is already a feature of YaBB SE.  All you need to have your users do is select the Topics they would like to receive notification for and then every time a post is made in that topic they will receive an email.

cheers.........

[airmon]

Thanks for the reply. I understand about the existing notification features. Those are nice, but they're missing a couple of things I'm looking for. If there's a way to activate the following stuff, I'm sorry I missed it, and please tell me how...

1. This is an *active* task. Users have to visit the site and select each and every topic for notification. I'm looking for something that would automatically notify selected users for ALL topics, even new ones that a user hasn't visited yet to select for notify.

2. The emails sent by the notification system doesn't include the actual post text. It only contains information that a new post exists, making the member visit the forum to read the post.

here's the notification I recieved for this topic:
>A reply, has been posted to a topic you are watching.
>
>View it at
>http://www.yabb.info/community/index.php?>board=141;action=display;threadid=4412
>
>Regards,
>The YaBB SE Community team.

this is useful If I choose to reply, since I've got to go to the forum anyway then, but it won't help me if I want to simply follow the topic via email.

3. The system is always active. While I don't care to turn of the regular notify system, I'd like to be able to turn off a system that sends all posts. I've done a little math:
By my estimates, if the YaBBSE community did this service for just half of their members, they'd have to send out about 250,000 emails a day. I suspect that you'd want to turn this off at that level.

I think that's it for key differences.

Airmon

[irbrian]

So you want people to be able to send and receive email in place of posting and reading?

Hmm... this would require very heavy modifications to the notification system, and would also require some sort of entirely seperate script that would retrieve emails from a particular address on a regular basis and distribute the contents in the form of posts to the board (by directly storing their contents in the appropriate section of the database).

While such a thing SEEMS to me to be possible, you're looking at essentially rewriting or adding large amounts of code to the Forum software. If you have PHP experience, then you may be able to do this yourself; however, while it would be cool to have an active email-based forum, I don't know that many other people would be willing to put forth this kind of effort for a "nice feature."

Perhaps someone else will disagree with me though.

[Greg Robson]

Hmmmm....

I think this sort of request would be best served by a proper mailing list manger. It would require too many changes to the nature and design of YaBB.  

[airmon]

yeah, some changes to the PHP would be needed. I've done a little, and I've got a basic plan. What might make things easier would be using an existing GPL mail list manager. Thats my current plan.

Here's my basic thoughts on the project:

1. Have the administrator add a user for each group that wishes to be able to receive all posts via email. This user's email address will be the general one for emailing all posts to group members. One user will have to be created for members that belong to no group.

2. (maybe...)Add a link on the member's prefs page that links users to add their email address to the mail list. (I see security at this stage as being the largest issue to deal with. Since I'm doing this for myself, I might ignore it and leave the adding of users to the mail lists a request-only thing, done manually to make sure users are in the correct group )

3. Change the code that creates topics to allow it to  populate the notify field when a topic is created. This number will be the user number for the group associated with the board containing the post.
 This will make the normal notify system send email for all posts to the appropriate mail list, which will then distribute it to all users that wish to be included.

4. Change the normal notify system to include the body of the latest post in the notify message, and if possible the Category and Board information.

I'm sure that a more skilled programmer than I could qickly find a better way to do this, but this is what I came up with.
The advantages I see of doing it in this manner are:

No changes to the tables.

Distribution of multiple emails left to another system, don't have to design that.

adds better notification for all users that includes post text.

Any thoughts on the above plan?