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