Administrative and Maintenance Tools - vBMQN - Moderation Queue Notifications + Desktop App

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THE VB3 VERSION IS LOCATED HERE !

Introduction
There are many scenarios where this mod would come in handy for administrators. There are too many for me to cover them all, so I will give you the scenario this mod was developed for...

If you have a hand full of moderating staff and a large number of forums, adding each moderator to each forum can be quite a pain, however doing it that way would give you notifications for those moderators when something dose need their attention from within those said forums...

Another option would be to setup staff to be Global Moderators, this removes the need to add them to specific forums but it also removes queue notifications because moderators wouldn?t be assigned to individual forums...

We require new members to be moderated and/or that their first submissions to the forum require moderating, this can become quite a pain because again staff would need to continually check the moderation queue for new items...

The Solution and Requirements
What we need is moderation queue notifications via email and possibly a desktop app for those staff that would rather not use their email/inbox.

Features:
- Email Notifications for multiple users/addresses
- Notifications for every item type (posts, threads, attachments etc.)
- Email sending using the vB mail method/system (plain text emails)
- Email generation should use the vB Phrase system (multi-language support)
- Automated checking of the moderation queue (vB Cron system)
- Should support the Scheduled Task log system (debugging, report actions taken)
- Support for external applications and their development (xml based status)

All of the above are present in the first release of this mod (v1), please see the screen shots.

This mod is setup as a vB Cron task; I could not see/find a better way to make this an automated system working with anything else from within the vB system. By default the Cron task is setup to run every 30 minutes, if you would like to adjust this, simply go in and adjust the Cron job as you wish.

Desktop App
At the moment I am still developing a windows (.net) desktop app to work with this, right now we don?t have a big need for this so it?s not a priority for me to develop this and get it out to you any time soon, when the moderation queue is checked regardless of its current state the included xml file is updated to reflect this. So all your own app would need to do is read in this xml file and take the action you require.

If there is a massive interest in the desktop app for this I could be persuaded to push it to the top of my job list, for now though it is work in progress and with no planned deadline or release date.

Support
We have been using this mod in a production environment for almost 12 months now with no problems at all, it is really quite a simple mod and I?m surprised it hasn?t been done already, given the number of requests I have seen.

I will support this as best I can, I am a busy guy so you will need to understand this if you do run into any problems and request support.

Install/Upgrade
Installing this mod is much like any other, upload the files in the download to the same locations on your server, import the product xml file, go to the Admin > Settings > Options > vBMQN: General Options page and configure as you wish. If you are upgrading from an older version simply follow the same steps as installing for the first time.

Change Log
v1.0 - 11 Feb 2013
- First version

v2.0 - 12 Feb 2013
- Added support for table prefix's ( config.php > $config['Database']['tableprefix'] = ''; )
- Rewrite of the database query code, now uses the vB Database Class ( $vbulletin->db->query_first )
- Changed from the use of the php "number_format" function to the vB function "vb_number_format"
- Added instant email notification rather than sending emails to the vB mail queue ( $notsubscription = true )

Enjoy!
This has helped us allot and I hope those of you who have requested this before find it to be ?just the job? as well.

Regards,
Lee Roberts

[Lee Roberts]

Hi guys,

I dont think any other mods would/will give this mod any problems its far to simple for that and the info it needs from the database is unlikely to change unless vB make an update or change and i really cant see that happening.

The "Moderator Control Panel" setting dose nothing more then setup the link in the email that you recive, you should have this set to "modcp" unless your moderator control panel is in a folder with another name.

Your welcome, hopefully I can make this happen for you.

Lee

[Bluemax712]

Thanks for the quick response Lee! Sent you a PM with the output

[Lee Roberts]

Hi,

Today it was clear I needed to do some more work on this mod as it was failing for people, today I have released version 2 and would like you to download and install this version.

Please see the "Change Log" section of the main description for the things that have been done. Version 2 also fix's the problems apsrfvb4 has been having, so generally version 2 is better, sorry for any inconvenience!

Thanks,
Lee

[Bluemax712]

Everything works perfect now Lee
Thanks so much for this awesome mod.

Installed on a 4.1.12 PL2 and a 4.2.0 PL3 server

[cdoyle]

Just installed, waiting for some moderated posts now

One thing for the next version that would be nice is to have an option so it just sends to all moderators.

[cdoyle]

OK,
I've gotten a couple moderated alerts, not quite how but I would like to change the URL in the email to something like this instead

http://www.caraudiocentral.net/forums/moderation.php

That way, I (or my mods) have the ability to ban the users as spammers etc.

I can't do that from the modcp.

[deadlySniper]

Tagged

I will wait to see further development before I deploy this on my site.

Great work!

[Lee Roberts]

Originally Posted by cdoyle

OK,
I've gotten a couple moderated alerts, not quite how but I would like to change the URL in the email to something like this instead

http://www.caraudiocentral.net/forums/moderation.php

That way, I (or my mods) have the ability to ban the users as spammers etc.

I can't do that from the modcp.

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback, details below to change the email body:

Goto: AdminCP > Languages & Phrases > Phrase Manager

From there change "Phrase Type:" to "Email Body Text", on the list that gets presented to you, look for "vbmqn" and choose "Edit" on the right for that Phrase, on the next page you will see it says "Text" and to the right of that you can see the default email body text:

Hello,

The moderation queue on $vboptions[bbtitle] has items waiting to be moderated.

Moderator Control Panel: $vboptions[bburl]/$vboptions[vbmqn_modcpdir]/index.php

All the best,
$vboptions[bbtitle] Admin

Under this section you will see a blank white input box, the title for this section of the page is called "Translations", to change the URL in the email you would add into the blank white box the below text:

Hello,

The moderation queue on $vboptions[bbtitle] has items waiting to be moderated.

Moderator Control Panel: http://www.caraudiocentral.net/forums/moderation.php

All the best,
$vboptions[bbtitle] Admin

If you wanted to you could change this text to:

Hello,

The moderation queue on $vboptions[bbtitle] has items waiting to be moderated.

Moderator Control Panel: $vboptions[vbmqn_modcpdir]

All the best,
$vboptions[bbtitle] Admin

and then from the options page for this mod, where you would normally put the name of the folder for the moderator control panel i.e "modcp" you could actually put the full url to the "moderation.php" file/page, so this would be "http://www.caraudiocentral.net/forums/moderation.php".

Doing it the later way would mean you dont need to navigate through the Phrase Manager every time you want to change this url, though i would probably consider this to be a "set and forget", so not somthing that would require change too often. The choice is yours really.

.Me

[Lee Roberts]

Originally Posted by deadlySniper

Tagged

I will wait to see further development before I deploy this on my site.

Great work!

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for your feedback, what kind of things would you like to see from its development?

.Me

[cdoyle]

Originally Posted by Lee Roberts

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback, details below to change the email body:

Goto: AdminCP > Languages & Phrases > Phrase Manager

From there change "Phrase Type:" to "Email Body Text", on the list that gets presented to you, look for "vbmqn" and choose "Edit" on the right for that Phrase, on the next page you will see it says "Text" and to the right of that you can see the default email body text:



Under this section you will see a blank white input box, the title for this section of the page is called "Translations", to change the URL in the email you would add into the blank white box the below text:



If you wanted to you could change this text to:



and then from the options page for this mod, where you would normally put the name of the folder for the moderator control panel i.e "modcp" you could actually put the full url to the "moderation.php" file/page, so this would be "http://www.caraudiocentral.net/forums/moderation.php".

Doing it the later way would mean you dont need to navigate through the Phrase Manager every time you want to change this url, though i would probably consider this to be a "set and forget", so not somthing that would require change too often. The choice is yours really.

.Me

Perfect!
Thank You!