Mini: Link Directly to PM in Email Notification

Ok, I realize this is TINY. Sorry. I figured it'd be worth posting anyway, though, because this tiny little hack has been extremely useful to me.

What's it do?
Short, and sweet: instead of a link to the Inbox in the new PM notification email, it displays a link directly to the message itself.

Known bugs
From what I understand, the mysql_insert_id() function is a little bit on the funky side...so it seems that, every few dozen emails I receive, just one doesn't work. This is a real rarity, though. 99% of the time it hums along without a hitch.

Ok, this hack is VERY simple. Here goes:

in private.php in your main forums directory, find the code below (around line 625 or so):

$DB_site->query("INSERT INTO privatemessage (privatemessageid,userid,touserid,fromuserid,title,message,dateline,showsignature,iconid,messageread,folderid,receipt) VALUES (NULL,$touserinfo[userid],$touserinfo[userid],$bbuserinfo[userid],'".addslashes(htmlspecialchars($title))."','".addslashes($message)."',".time().",'$signature','$iconid',0,0,$receipt)");

RIGHT after it, place this:

$the_pm_id = $DB_site->insert_id();

Save and upload. Yep, that's it for code editing! Then, open the email_pmreceived, and use the $the_pm_id variable as you please. Here's how I used it:

$touserinfo[username],

You have received a new private message at $bbtitle from $bbuserinfo[username]. Please click here to log in and read it:
$bburl/private.php?action=show&privatemessageid=$the_pm_id

Thanks,
$bbtitle

Attached is a quick screenshot of what the email looks like when I receive it. Works well for me. If anyone's got any suggestions, feel free to let me know. I hope this is useful.

[fury]

You sure you didn't add it after the query inside if ($savecopy) { }? The queries do look very similar at the beginning

If your users do not elect to save copies of their private messages, then this hack would not work, if that's where you added them. You have to add them in the query that is right after this line:

// enhanced - added $receipt to insert

Thanks for the great hack, Commish!

[NYI Fan]

This is GREAT! Thank you!

[TWTCommish]

No problem -- I'm glad you like it. I find it highly useful...so I figured others would as well. BTW: this could be modified slightly to include, say, the title and time sent along with the username and link. Wouldn't be too tough, I don't think.

[tanster]

Wonderful. Thank you!

Jennie

[tanster]

Originally posted by X-Fan
I've installed this and it seemed to work okay but now I've gotten a bunch of e-mails notifying me of PM's that didn't have the privatemessageid number in the URL so leads to an error page when you click it.

I encountered the same problem, and I think it occurs when you're sending PMs to multiple recipients. If you add the same line of code to private2.php (as well as private.php), that seems to fix it.

[FleaBag]

Cheers Chris. Running on 2.3.0.

[Boofo]

TWTCommish. how did you get the Date, To, Subject and From part in your message? Would you be willing to share the code for that?

[TWTCommish]

That's just part of the email.

[Mystis]

I believe that I saw on the PHP changelog that the mysql_insert_id() function problems were fixed in 4.3.0

[djwins]

Can someone update this for 3.0.7? It doesn't seem to have the same code.
Thanks!