The biggest feature needed....

[thewitt]

Now that I've re-read this one and I understand it, I disagree that this is The biggest feature needed.... I have no interest in this feature at all. I would rather see email participation - at least subscription and posting notification - than email services built into vBulletin sites.

-t

[chrispadfield]

in a way the two are connected in some sence because the hardest part about both is getting the email and sorting out what it is. I have already posted some code that i started working on in another thread for doing a lot of this, it included a decent pop3 class and some basic determination of the nature of the email, there is still quite a lot of work to be done and i don't have the time at the moment for it.

Still integrating email would be brilliant, at the moment the option i am considering is from gossamer-threads but it is $450 which is a lot! there is no better way to make your site sticky than for people to need to come to it to collect email and allowing pop3 access for a small yearly fee is a good revenue generator (at least 10 people from my site have said they would pay $20 a year for that) and i think others would as well.

[chrispadfield]

Originally posted by thewitt
Now that I've re-read this one and I understand it, I disagree that this is The biggest feature needed.... I have no interest in this feature at all. I would rather see email participation - at least subscription and posting notification - than email services built into vBulletin sites.

-t

how do you mean by this "subscription and posting notification"? if instead of the "there has been a reply to your post...." you want the post sent by email, well this just needs small modification to the email sent with an extra field for the post to be sent as well.

[teenfront]

I am also really interested in this mod. I have looked into it and rather than build something from the ground up which with my current knowledge would not be possible I decided to intergrate with the ecreation software (http://buildacommunity.com/)

How easy / well would this work?

Cheers,
Nick

[dabean]

If your on about their Auto-EmailPro software personally I wouldn't bother as your going open a world of trouble trying to seemlessly link it with vB. The biggest UI problem will be tieing PHP & perl together without double parsing via SSI. Linking the registration/user systems will be complex to as you'll have to decide which perl mysql handler to use, you may even find that your server doesn't have the perl DBI libs installed.

To sum up large chunk of the core of that product will need to modified to link it with vB or any DB based system for that matter.

[thewitt]

Originally posted by chrispadfield
how do you mean by this "subscription and posting notification"? if instead of the "there has been a reply to your post...." you want the post sent by email, well this just needs small modification to the email sent with an extra field for the post to be sent as well.

People should be allowed to subscribe to a forum and get notification - including the text of the post if configured to do so - whenever anyone posts.

Today you only get notification when someone posts in a thread where you have posted. This does not help the "lurkers" any, and there are many more lurkers than posters.

On low volume boards, this "general subscripton" method of notification when someone posts on the forum brings people to the site to reply and participate as soon as someone posts. If they don't want to reply or to look at the attachment, they don't even bother checking in - they simply participate on the forum as a reader, by email.

I used to have this with WebBBS and have lost it since moving to vBulletin. I have to get it back somehow .

-t

[chrispadfield]

you don't have to post to get updates from a thread, you just need to click on the link at the top "receive notifications for this thread".

The only feature i feel lacking here is the notification of new threads, i think you should get this when you subscribe to a forum and once vb final is out it is hack i definitely intend to make.

[thewitt]

Close, but not quite enough. I did forget about the "send me replies to this thread" link, but even that is one extra step.

I should be able to simply subscribe to a forum and get all the posts, new thread or not, without having to come visit unless I want to reply.

This is the request from my community. I'm going to have to provide it sometime.

[teenfront]

thanks for the advice, i love VB am in the position where i am told we are going to use ecreation software so my opinion is useless!! do you know any other board software which will work better with the ecreation stuff?

Cheers,
Nick

My co-admin of eDevBoards JamesUS is working on this I think.