Major Additions - Email Integration (New threads/replies by email)

This mod is based off of the Mail Reply modification by Colin F to which I have obtained permission to rewrite and release.

This modification allows you to mimic email lists such as yahoo groups through your forums!

After installing this modification you will have new settings in your forum manager where for each forum you can enable this modification and setup a separate email address to use for each forum that you have this enabled for.

Just like how there is a separate email address for each yahoo group.

After doing so, members can subscribe to each forum that this mod is enabled for to receive notifications for new threads and replies.

Any posts in that forum, will be sent to them via email. (Example email attached below). The users can then reply to that email (which will then be processed and posted to the forums through the cron job that runs every 10 minutes), or they can send a new email to the email address and a brand new thread will be created!

Essentially mimicing an email list! Suddenly those users that hate forums, can still be dragged into the conversations and help keep the forum's activity level up!


BUGS!
These are the known bugs to date:

• Confirmed bug that email processing does not handle Japanese characters.

Unsupported Items
These are the items that are not currently supported:

• Some custom bbcode modifications will not display like they do on the forums in the html emails. Like glow, and the table mod.

TO UPGRADE

• Please see the file in the zip for upgrading!! If your upgrading from version 2.3.X you will need to reverse some file edits that are no longer nessecary!

NEW INSTALL

• See instructions in the zip file.

VERSION HISTORY!
(See the file in the zip for a complete history!)

• 2.6 Release
  • Bug Fixes
    • Joining an unmoderated public group will now auto subscribe you per the usergroup settings.
    • NO CONFLICTS with Instant Thread Subscription! See details in below post.
  • New Stuff
    • User Option Allow Auto Subscribe - This is an admin allowable, user option that let's the user choose to not be auto subscribed.
    • User Option not receive own posts - A new user option that lets them select to NOT receive their own posts via email.
    • Editted the phrase for the Auto Subscription script to tell people what to do if there are no listings.
    • Added error checks when saving a usergroup for if auto subscriptioin is entered with a forumid for a forum that does not have email integration enabled and also checks that the usergroup you are saing is entered in the forum manager as allowed to use email integration.
• 2.6.1 Release (BETA VERSION)
  • Hot Fix
    • It appears I was unseting a variable too soon. I've corrected this and it has resolved the issue with multiple posted replies on my test server.

Most of these will be slow to make it in til I know I've got the code to handle just about every type of email we could receive But in anycase, here are the ideas for future versions!

• End User Option to subscribe to just receive new thread emails, or receive all new thread & reply emails (current version does all new threads & replies).

Thanks to RedTyger, Bob Denny, Ed Kohwley and Chris McKeever for their additions and assistance with portions of this code.

Huge thanks also goes to the many individuals that have helped test various incarnations of this mod.

MAD PROPS TO: cgmckeever for a great quoting regex for the old format, and all the mods at www.4winmobile.com for helping test version 2.4 prior to release!!

You guys rock!

Please feel free to donate to my continued work on this modification!! It let's me spend more time on it!
Make a Donation!

Version 2.6 will work with both 3.6.8 and 3.7!

The #.X versions are the solid tested versions.

The #.X.X versions are the beta versions. New features and bug fixes will be worked in there and then when I have a solid version it'll be released as the next #.X

Thank you!!

~ Cyricx

[lbernstein]

My duplicates are very random and don't seem to happen in any particular forum or associated with any individual user. Just had another this morning and had to lock off the thread. Not sure how to troubleshoot this problem. I don't think I checked off the debug option when installing, and not sure how to check that at this point.

[angeljs]

Originally Posted by toivo

Hi Kevin,

Here is the code, working under vB 3.6.8. Replace the variables $forum_url and $cron_url.

The script reads the home page, extracts the cron.php with the parameters from the result and then sends a request for cron.php which runs the scheduled task(s).

Check the results from the vB back end to adjust the interval in your crontab or Windows scheduler, depending on which other cron jobs your site has.

<?php
/**
 * @forum_read.php
 * @20080723 toivo@totaldata.biz
 * reads the forum home page and triggers cron jobs to run
 * tested on vBulletin 3.6.8.
 * requires php >= 4.3.0
 */

$forum_url = 'http://example.com/testvb/index.php';
// cron url from <img src=
$cron_url = 'http://example.com/testvb/cron.php?';

// access forum
$run_status = forum_read($forum_url, $cron_url);
return;

function forum_read($forum_url, $cron_url) {
//  read file contents
  $page = file_get_contents($forum_url);
  if ($page === false) {
  	  $msg = "forum_read.php unable to read ".$forum_url;
  	  error_log($msg);
  	  return false;
  }
// find cron.php
  $cron_start_pos = strpos($page, $cron_url);

  $msg = '';
  if ($cron_start_pos === false) {
  	  $msg = "forum_read.php unable to find cron string";
  	  error_log($msg);
  	  return false;
  }

// end of url
  $cron_end_pos = strpos($page, '"', $cron_start_pos);
  if ($cron_end_pos === false) {
  	  $msg = "forum_read.php unable to find end of cron string";
  	  error_log($msg);
  	  return false;
  }
// extract full url string with cron.php
  $cron_url_length = $cron_end_pos - $cron_start_pos;
  $cron_full_url = substr($page, $cron_start_pos, $cron_url_length );
 //  read cron.php with parameters
  $page = file_get_contents($cron_full_url);
  if ($page === false) {
      $msg = 'forum_read.php '.$cron_full_url." : - PROBLEM?";
  	  error_log($msg);
  	  return false;
  }
  return true;
}
?>

If you are going to run it from Unix/Linux, a shell script similar to the following can be scheduled to run from a crontab entry:

#!/bin/bash
# load forum home page and read cron.php
php /root/forum_read/forum_read.php
exit 0

In Windows, you can run the script from a command file through the Windows scheduler.

Regards,
toivo

So would I have to set this up as a seperate cron job? Which command would I use for the cron and how often would it have to run? I'm a cron newbie, so any help would be appreciated.

[toivo]

Assuming that you are going to run the shell script which runs the PHP command line script, you need to create a new job in crontab. Details of the syntax can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron#crontab_syntax

You may want to run the PHP script once every 5 to 15 minutes and experiment with the speed of response which also depends on the frequency that the Email Integration job in the Scheduled Task Manager in vBulletin has been set to run.

[angeljs]

Ok, thanks for all the help...I'll give it a go

[lbernstein]

HELP!!!
I''m once again having duplicate messages going out. I'm not sure how to troubleshoot the problem. Can anyone help?

[amphicar770]

Will this mod be ported to VB4.0? I can not updgrade before that time or I will have a user revolt on my hands!!

[AyeCapn]

Originally Posted by amphicar770

Will this mod be ported to VB4.0? I can not upgrade before that time or I will have a user revolt on my hands!!

I'm in the same boat with this and a few other mods. It's become core functionality fora group of my users.

[amphicar770]

Looks like Cyricx has not been on-line here since September. That is not a good sign!!

I can only ibegin to imagine the time and skill that must go into developing something like this mod. I made 2-3 contributions over the past 2 years. I do hope other users have done the same, it is critical to encouraging continued development and support.

[toivo]

Will this mod be ported to VB4.0?

Looks like Cyricx has not been on-line here since September

Check out today's post by Cyricx at https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...169247&page=15.

I am happy to contribute, I have produced a couple of fixes and also cloned the EI Mod plugins to support moderated forums: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...151222&page=67

[toivo]

A patch for moderated forums tested with 3.8.4 is now available from https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=1980256

Toivo