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

[Cyricx]

Got a fix, once I get it verified on a few of the forums having issues, I'll toss it up

[Cyricx]

UPDATED!!

Here's the update message I sent out -

As many have noticed I'm on a bug squashing and obliterating mission!

I had hoped to get a few more minor bugs fixed in this version but
finally found the most elusive and meanest one which was causing people to
get errors when replying to some threads.

The criteria to cause this bug was:

A user must be subscribed to the thread, the thread must be in a forum
that email integration has been enabled. That user must not be
subscribed for instant notification to the forum... only the thread.

Then you would get the error.

I've added a quick fix for the error in 2.5.4

Please upgrade.

If you notice any quirks... bugs... or issues... PLEASE let me know.
I'm devoted to making this a solid modification but I rely on your input


Thank you for your support and patience!

~ Chris

[tekguru]

Fingers crossed Chrisas we'd noticed the bug creep in the last few days.

[Cyricx]

Yeah, I definately snagged that puppy

I'll start doing some code for 2.6 next which will add in alot of user options and come up with a solution for subscribing to a thread, but not the forum.

[RWerksman]

Chris,

As soon as I upgraded to to 2.5.4 and re-enabled this mod, my double posting issues reappeared. I'll PM you.

[tekguru]

Well for me it fixed the double post problem we had hit again.

[Cyricx]

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that I hadn't dropped off the planet and I'm working on the bugs that have been reported.

Here is a list of known confirmed bugs.

These are ones that I have NOT been able to duplicate so may actual be due to issues with another modification:

• Duplicate replies when posting in a forum that EI is turned on for. - Unable to confirm.
• Headers when sent through a forwarder are lost when Gmail receives them. - Resolved, this was a user error. Didn't change the hearders to "\n" to match their server settings.
• Occasionally lists a newthread poster as "unregistered" in the email that is sent out. - FIXED in 2.5.5

These are ones that I HAVE been able to duplicate in my test board and I'm working on fixes for them now:

• Does not correctly decode iso-2022-jp emails.
• Does not carry reply title to email. - FIXED in 2.5.5
• Subscribeforums.php file shows forums that are links. - FIXED in 2.5.5

Please let me know if you are also experiencing any of the unduplicated bugs so that perhaps I can compare your site to the one having the issue to determine what may be the joining factor

The few bugs we are down to seem to only affect one site out of 40 LOL. So the criteria for bugs is getting very obscure... but hey... like I said.. I'm committed to making the most solid major addition modification on vb.org

[Cyricx]

Well... I went from 2.5.4 and went straight to a 2.6 release

Prolly had something to do with spending 8 hours doing nothing but working on this code hehe

2.5.5 was created in the interim and not released as while working on some bugs I made some huge breakthroughs in what I wanted done for 2.6... which is the coexistance with thread subscriptions as well as the user options for not getting their own posts and (if the admin allows them to) users can select to not be autosubscribed.

Check my second post in this thread for details on how the coexistance with thread subscriptions work.

I'm undecided at this time if I'm going to try to work thread subscriptions to let yu reply via email or not. It could require ALOT of file editting in the functions_newpost.php file which I'm trying to avoid as many file edits as possible.

All in all, I'm excited to feel like this may be my final version for awhile with the exception of working on the last confirmed bug of it not handling japanese characters


Several have asked for the cron jobs not to depend upon vbulletin traffic to work.

I'm really not up for writing something that intensive... it would involve creating a queue system as well as trying to teach people how to create cron jobs on their server... yeah.. not my piece of the pie

Plus I'm very happy with the way that this works with vbulletin. My forums typically have 1-2 visitors on them at a time right now and it's still working great.

The point of this is NOT to replace vbulletin. I want to encourage the users to come to the forums and hopefully eventually weed them off the mailing list lifestyle and into the forum lifestyle so to speak

In anycase, I do have a script that could run by cron job, but it still uses vbmail which requires traffic to activate vbmail and send the emails.. so.. hey.

You could modify it to use regular php mail but I would prolly advise against it as it could crash a server if you tried to send off 1000 emails at once!

Enough babble... hope you enjoy the latest version and donations are certainly appreciated

Thank you!

[bc3tech]

props to you for being on top of ish, mang!

just one thing that i've found thus far: you fixed the collapse/expand bug i mentioned, but now when you collapse the listing on the page for this mod, the image that should turn into an expand image, is n/a - i'm guessing a typo in the image name or something.

B

[Cyricx]

Try hitting ctrl+f5 to refresh your browers.

I'm betting you have the old image still stored in your temporary files