Email Reminder for inactive users
 

AS OF MARCH 16TH 2013 - THIS ADDON IS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED DUE TO INSUFFICIENT TIME AVAILABLE. THANK YOU ALL FOR USING THIS ADDON AND FOR YOUR SUPPORT. IF YOU OR YOU KNOW OF ANYONE THAT WOULD BE ABLE TO PICK UP WHERE I LEFT OFF ON THIS ADDON, PLEASE DO SO. I'M RELEASING THIS ADDON TO THE VBULLETIN COMMUNITY TO UPDATE AS NEEDED.
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What does it do?
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This mod will send out reminder emails to inactive members to encourage them to come back to your site.

I also want to give full credit and thanks to the developers of the previous versions from which this was derived:
technom8t (Email reminder for inactive users 1.0.0)
C Braithwaite and djbaxter (Email reminder for inactive users v1.2.7)
robertjandreu (Email reminder for inactive users 1.1.3)

*** See Updates section below for new feature list per release. ***

IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS WITH THE ADDON, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THE INSTALLED LINK!! THANK YOU!!

Features
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* Turn product on/off.
* Set the number of days a user can be away from your site before being considered inactive. (Default: 30 days)
* Send reminder emails once and once only during any inactive period. (Default: Off)
* Edit maximum number of reminder emails sent totally.
* Set how often an reminder email is sent during an inactive period .
* Set reminder email format - TEXT or HTML.
* Set the reminder email subject. (phrased) (site must be placed in debug mode currently to edit, not translate)
* Set the reminder email body. (phrased) (site must be placed in debug mode currently to edit, not translate)
* Set the usergroups to be sent a reminder email.
* Set userids to exclude.
* Log inactive users that have been sent a reminder.

Install Instructions
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This was written specifically for VB4. The VB3.8.x version is here.

IMPORTANT BEFORE YOU INSTALL, IF YOU HAVE A PREVIOUS VERSION INSTALLED I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU BACK UP YOUR
CUSTOM REMINDER MESSAGE SUBJECT AND MESSAGE BODY THIS MOD WILL OVER WRITE THEM. ALSO, IN VERSION 2.x, REMINDER
MESSAGE CONTENTS HAS BEEN MOVED TO USING VBPHRASES. LOOK IN THE INSTALL.TXT FILE WITH THIS UPLOAD FOR A LIST OF
PHRASES USED IN THIS MOD.

1. Back up Custom Reminder Email Phrases that you have made.
2. Upload file in the upload folder to the forums folder on your server.
3. In your AdminCP:
a. If you've installed an older version of this mod prior to 1.1.4 you must uninstall it first as well as remove the files that came with it. I can not stress this enough.
b. Go to Plugs & Products -> Product Manager -> Add New Product.
c. Import the product xml from the zip file. (make sure to use overwrite)
4. The mod is disabled by default on install so you will need to enable it. Go to Vbulletin "Settings" -> Options -> Inactivity Reminder Emails.
5. Settings and the inactivity log viewer are also available on the left menu just above the users settings group.

History Log
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Update 2.2.1
* NEW : New plugin resets inactive members when they return to site.
* FIX : UserID field in inactivity log was showing 0, and UserID was not being added to the optout url.

UpDate 2.2.0
* CHANGE : Inactivity is now based on members Last Activity Date.
* ADD : Exporting the following additional values which can be used in reminder email templates. Check readme.txt in zip file for list of place holders.

Update 2.1.5
* CHANGE : Mod no longer has the option of adding a footer credit to the end of your website.
* CHANGE : Mod no longer has the option of adding a footer credit to outgoing emails.
* CHANGE : New Reminder Optout: Currently this is only accessable from emails being sent out.

Note: Please let members know that they may receive one more email at which time they can choose to optout/unsubscribe by clicking on the embedded link or copying/paste it into
their browser.

* FIX : Reminders were still being sent out incorrectly. I believe this is now fixed finally.
* FIX : Issues when emails were sent out had the incorrect "From" address and listed the host domain name. This should be resolved now.
* FIX : Issue regarding special characters in the usernames being added to the database has been resolve.
* NEW: New data fields have been implimented for keeping track of when reminders are sent out and how many a member has received. If you have a had this mod installed since version 1.1.4, it will look for those fields and rename them so you do not loose previous data in those fields, otherwise new fields will be added.
* NEW: I've added the ability to turn off the admin report. In this version, if it is enabled, you may receive 2 reports. One report for members that have never received a reminder and one for members who haven't received a reminder since the last reminder based on the frequencey setting in the mod settings screen.
* NEW: Reminder's sender and email address are correctly determined now. Should now reflect site name with the webmasteremail address as the reply to.
* CHANGE :Translations for 2.1.1 may not work for versions after since some templates and phrases have been removed.

Update 2.1.1 (6/24/2010) - German Translation - (Thanks Semmi)
Thanks to Semmi for translating the Admin menu, Phrases and Reminder Phrase Templates to German.

Update 2.1.1 (3/30/2010) - Bug Fix
* FIX - Removed extra where clause in query where scheduled task script was performing an update when inactive reminders where based on last post count.
* FIX - Email Phrase Templates - Changed $bburl variable to $forumurl to correct a broken unsubscribe link.
* NEW - Includes tool to reset the date and count of reminder emails that were previously sent to users. This tool is mainly for testing purposes.

Update 2.1.0 (3/26/2010) - Bug Fixs and some new features
* Edit number of emails send totally
* Choose whether inactivity is based on members "Last Post" or their "Last Activity"
* Keep a log of all inactive users contacted
* Opt-Out Feature for members - Include an opt-out link in reminder email. (Thanks to Gene Steinberg)
* Added a link to the bottom of the default email template phrases that members can use to unsubscribe from reminder emails.

Update 2.0.1 (03/15/2010 9:00pm) - Bug Fix
* FIX - Issue related to processing users in a batch configuration. Mod was checking for a field length greater than zero instead of a numeric value greater than zero.

Update 2.0.0 (03/15/2010) - Complete rewrite of mod
* NEW - Can specify number of users to process during nightly scheduled task.
* NEW - Send reminder emails in either text or html format.
* NEW - Email subject and message body uses vb phrase templates. I've included sample content in email phrase templates so all you need to is customize as desired.

Update 1.1.4 (03/05/2010) - Initial release for vBulletin 4.x
* FIX - Would continue to send out email more often than specified intervals due to incorrect setting in cron job.
* NEW - Exclude userids from processing.


IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS WITH THE ADDON, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. THOSE THAT HAVE NOT INDICATED THE MOD IS INSTALLED WILL BE A LOWER PRIORITY.

PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THE INSTALLED LINK!! THANK YOU!!

PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO NOMINATE.

If you like this mod and it has helped your site, and would like to see more features added, please consider donating.
Your support is very much appreciated! Thank you - Thank you :)

*Reserved* - New Tutorial and Screen Shots coming

If you can do this:
Detect bounced email, mark it as bounced so the user is not to be contacted again so as to avoid spam, and then move that user into a separate usergroup.

You will be my new best friend ^^ lol

LOL cool beans! :) It's on my list of things to do. :D

Thanks.

Tagged for later as I just woke up but been waiting for this.

Great.

So far so good.

Peace,
Gene

Wish list for one more feature:

When a message is bounced — hence moved to a different user group — a message about the problem is automatically sent via PM to that member. That way if and when they login, they know there's a problem and can write to us with their new email address.

That possible?

Peace,
Gene

And nothing personal, but your credit line at the footer of the forum doesn't turn off even if you turn it off.

Peace,
Gene

Good idea. I'll add this to my list of TODOs.. and definitely look into it. Thanks for the feedback! :)

Ok I'll look into this this evening.

excellent mod

When you deactivate it then reactivate does it send the e-mail out again ?

Not when you deactivate and reactivate.. If you uninstall it and reinstall it will because it removes fields that this mod uses from the database.

As a quick fix for you and those that have this installed:

1. Go into AdminCP -> Plugins and Products System
2. Go to Plugin Manager
3. Scroll down and look for "Inactive User Reminder Emails"
4. Open the "Footer Addition Plugin"
5. Replace the PHP code with the following code:

6. Click Save

I will update the product zip file in a moment.

Thank you.

One more friendly suggestion: One of our members would like to see an opt-out feature. This would probably require that you set up a database of users for whom emails aren't sent if they click some sort of link in the reminder email. It may be difficult to implement, but some forum members can be ticklish on this subject as you might understand.

Peace,
Gene

This shouldn't be too hard.

Thanks.

Peace,
Gene

Tagged for now, but looks very promising! I'll give this a shot later when I have the time.

Thanks Virginia, I've been using the old one since 3.6 and no doubt this is going to be usefull.

Question: The last version C Braithwaite had of problem with detecting inactivity, you know probably are familiar with this issue that hos mod sent e-mails when people were checking out the pages through the web site and this cause a lot of issues flooding users mail boxes with the same e-mail several times, also increasing server load too. The old version were stable and used cron job instead besides doesn't have options to set different e-mails message and were too simple.
Can you tell us more about how your version works ? You know, I'm one that suffered lots of complains from users with tons of e-mails and just want to make sure this won't cause me issues like that again.

Tagged.. will install when i go LIVE with VB4 :)

You're welcome :)


If I understand correctly what you are asking, the reason the 1.1.3 version had that issue was that the emailDate field and emailCount fields in the vb_user table was set to the incorrect data type for what the application was trying to put in there. It was set to just an Integer data type with no length to it. I set both fields to Integer but added a width of 10 so it would allow for a timestamp for emailDate and a larger count for emailCount. So far it seems to be working ok.

HUGE! Great plug-in, thank you!

This morning, I got this message about 40 times over a period of about an hour:

Thoughts?

Peace,
Gene

Hmmmm... Looking into now. How active is your site? What are the entries in your scheduled tasks log for Inactive email reminders? What times did it run? We might need to set it to run only at the beginning of the week. I believe it's set to run every hour currently.

I have three vBulletin forums. The one where the problem occurred has over 2,400 members and between 50 and 250 new posts each day.

I ran it once manually upon installation, and then let it work by itself. The problem occurred after 1:30 AM server time (Arizona) this morning, apparently during its automatic session.

I'm attaching a screen shot of the settings, which apply to all the forums, but only the most visited one exhibited this problem.

Peace,
Gene

Can you tell me how many log entries there are in the scheduled tasks log for the mod?
Are there 40 entries? or did you receive 40 emails?

I have this tagged, great mod been waiting for this to be ported onto vb4.0... Thank's!

Yes to both. Multiple log entries, and multiple emails.

Peace,
Gene

When does the scheduled job say it's supposed to run again? It's the column before the dropdown and GO button. Trying to narrow down what may be causing the issue.

03-07-2010
01:00 AM

Peace,
Gene

Ok. I'm investigating the issue. If we could let it run again, I'd like to see what happens. It's very odd because I'm not seeing anything in the code that would make it do that multiple times so I'm wondering if it's something related to the cron job causing it to execute that script over and over or something unique to your site.

Gene,

Try setting the cron job to look like this so it executes Monday's at 12:30am. If this works, I'll update the product zip file.

It'll run tomorrow morning, so we'll see.

That one site is similar to another we have and all the forums have the same basic setups and add-ons.

Peace,
Gene

I to have received multiple e-mails not 40 though only about 15

apart from the 1st one which lists all the e-mails addys that have been sent to all the others read

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This email shows that the product is installed and working as it should be.


There were no inactive users at this time.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2010/03/76.jpg

by default this was my settings

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2010/03/77.jpg

Try setting setting the cron job so it matches the image in my previous post:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....6&postcount=31

Let me know if it still having issues. Sounds like the current cron job is kicking off around 1am then running very minute or so for one hour. My originial intention was to have it run 1 time at 1am.

I did. We'll see what happens.

Peace,
Gene

Can this MOD be used to resend activation emails weekly to users who are in the 'Users Awaiting Email Confirmation' usergroup?

I currently do this manually every Friday morning - would love to automate it...

Might be able to do it.. I'll look into it. Would that change the whole scope of the addon though?

I've got to install this.

Thanks Bryan! :) Let me know if you run into any issues or think of a feature you would like to have added.

I installed this mod and scheduled it to run every Tuesday at 9am. I will post back and let everybody know how it went once it runs on Tuesday. I will also post the results to show whether or not it had any effect on getting users to return.