[TalkVirginia]

Inactive User Reminder Emails Tutorial

This is a sort of intro tutorial on this mod. If you have further questions, haven't made something clear, please let me know and I'll add it to this write up.

Inactive Reminders Menu Group
First up, as you can see from this screen, you can find the settings in it's own menu group just above the vBulletin Users menu group. You can also find it by going to the vBulletin "Settings" menu group at the top.

How does processing occur?
This mod uses an scheduled Cron Job called "Inactive User Reminder Emails" and can be found in the Scheduled Tasks Manager. When installed, it's configured to run nightly at 1:30am.




Enabling the mod
This mod is disabled by default on first-time install. If you are upgrading from a previous version, you should still make sure it's enabled. In addition, you should do a save even if no settings are changed to save settings for any new features.




Batch Processing
This comes into play if you have a large site and don't want to overwhelm your host with 20k or more worth reminder emails sent at one time. This feature will allow you to set the amount of reminders sent out during each scheduled cron job




Send Reminder Emails Once Only
If you want to send out reminders only one time to your members after they have become inactive, you can do this by setting this option to yes.



Maximum Email To Send
If you set the option above to No, then this option will be used. Set this to any amount greater than zero and that is all your inactive members will receive. Set it to 3, and once the counter reaches 3, no more reminders will be sent.




Inactivity Grace Period
This allows you to set a variable threshold or number of days before your members are consided to be inactive. I would recommend setting this to 30 days or higher. Once they have not logged in for this many days, on the following day they will start receiving reminder emails.



Inactivity based on Last Post *REMOVED*
[S]
If this is set to Yes, then user inactivity will be determined by the date which they last posted. Users will begin receiving reminders the day after the number of days set for Inactivity Grace Period, if they haven't posted within that amount of time. If this is set to No, then Inactivity will be based on the last time the user visited your site.
[/S]
Inactivity is now based on Last Activity Date only. If you feel that inactivity should be based on something else, please let me know what, and why and I will think about changing it but this seemed to be the most logical at the time.



How often should reminder emails be sent?
After users have become inactive either based on last post or their last activity on your site, reminder emails will be sent every x number of days set here. If you set this option to 7, users will receive email reminders once a week, after their initial reminder has been received, until they log in again and/or make a post.



Usergroups to receive reminder emails
This option is required. You will need to specify which Usergroup IDs are to receive inactivity reminder emails. IDs must be separated with a comma.



Exclude User IDs
If there is a user in one of the Usergroups specified above, that you do not want to receive reminder emails, you can indicate that here.



Email Format
This option enables you to set the format that users receive reminders in, as well as the format that admins receive notification that this addon is working. You can set this to either TEXT or HTML. This will not affect other emails that are sent out through vBulletin. I have included sample reminder email content, however reminder emails use vBulletin phrases so thay can be customized as you like. You can change them by clicking on the links shown here with this option, or through the vBulletin Phrase Manager. The phases are located in the Email Subject and Email Message phrase groups. The phrases this mod installs are called inactivity_reminder_plaintext and inactivity reminder_html. They are called the same in both phrase groups. You may alter the contents of these phases however please do not change the names. You may include variables such as $username, $userid, $email, $bbtitle, $homeurl, $forumurl, and $hometitle. If you would like to include other information in your content, please let me know and I'll will look into adding it in future versions.




Enable Admin Email Report: This option gives you the choice of receiving an admin report with a list of members that were sent inactivity reminders.

Enable Logging: This will allow you to turn logging on and off. This records who have been sent reminder emails.

Inactivity Log Duration: How many days do you want to keep in the log. Each time the Cron Job runs and emails are sent out, users will recorded in the log, then any entries older than the number of days indicated here will be automatically purged.

That's about it. Any questions? Comments? Any features requests?

I want to thank everyone that has downloaded and is using this mod on their site. Your constructive comments, both positive and negative, give me a lot of encouragement to do more and do better.