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

[Alfa1]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

Mostly what I need from beta testers is to come to my test site and try to break it

Break it on my site, and I can find the bugs easier then I can try to find how they happened on someone else's server

What is the url of your test site? I'll be happy to help you test it. Maybe post the url in the main post of this thread as well.

[riahiarshia]

Originally Posted by kevinh

In the mean time I am trying to disable posts by email while retaining the notifications.

I have modified the phrases for the new thread and new post emails so that they no longer contain the 'reply between the lines section' and make no reference to replying or starting threads by email. It's a bit of a bodge but it will work. However, in the notification emails I am getting far too much space above and below the previous message section.

I'm assuming this must be down to a php file - can someone please tell me which file it is that creates these email message?

Kevin,
The forum has an option to send emails to subscribed users. You do not need EI for that.
-Alex

[kevinh]

Originally Posted by riahiarshia

Kevin,
The forum has an option to send emails to subscribed users. You do not need EI for that.
-Alex

Yes, but I want to subscribe people to certain forums by default when they subscribe.

It's academic now anyway because I'm pressing a head with EI after seeing reply #843

[kevinh]

Would someone please explain how I make this mod to a forum running 3.7.1 (what file to I edit? - I can't find anything called "newthread_post_complete"

Thanks,
Kevin

Originally Posted by Ron Wilhelm

Thanks for a great plugin. This really elevates vBulletin's usability. I had one problem though - new threads didn't show the posters name in the initial email on "CURRENT MESSAGE FROM:" line for new style emails. I played around with this and fixed it by changing

$poster = $bbuserinfo['username'];

to

$poster = $vbulletin->userinfo[username];

in the newthread_post_complete plugin.

EDIT: I know my profile shows 3.6.7, but this was also on my 3.6.8 PL2 dev board.

[kevinh]

Another question for the EI experts

How long should it take for a reply by email to be posted on the forum?

I just had one take half an hour to come through so it ended up out of sequence with another post on the forum. In fact it was as if the forum post triggered the retrieval of the email reply.

[toivo]

Hi Kevin,

That is exactly how the 'cron' jobs work, they rely on the forum being accessed. I scheduled a small PHP script on an another box to access the home page every so often to guarantee a reasonable response time to emails.

Regards,
toivo

[kevinh]

Hi Toivo,

Would you mind explaining how I can do this because most of my users will be migrating from a mail list and I fear that many of them will use email integration and not access the forum very often, at least initially.

Regards,
Kevin

[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

[riahiarshia]

AHHHH. This all makes sense now. I have been scratching my head to find out why EI is inactive at night. I was starting to think the little men who run around and fetch emails are sleeping. LOL

[riahiarshia]

I put in the workaround in #843. I have not had any issues so far.

-Alex