Private Message Workbench: Read, Search, Delete, Report and more

PM Workbench v1.00 Beta 5

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Hack: PM Workbench
Version: 1.00 Beta 5
Author: MarcoH64
vB Version: vBulletin 3.5.0. RC2
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Important Notice:
Depending on the modules installed, a privacy statement might be added to your board.
This Privacy Statement can not be removed or hidden by any means. Failure to comply would be against the TOS
of this hack, and you would not be allowed to use it.

If your board already has a Privacy Notice covering reading Private Messages by Administrators, you can PM me a link to that statement on your board (provide test login if needed) and your email address, and i will mail a Plugin to remove the Privacy link.


What is this hack?
PM Workbench offers you a variety of tools for working with or extending the standard vBulletin Private Message System.
It is a Modular System that will allow you to add those functions that you need for your board. New Modules might be added later.
The system is fully phrased and options can be set in vBulletin Options.
Permissions to use Modules are given using the includes/config.php for increased security.
Currently no file or template edits are needed.

More modules might be added later. For some i am waiting for new hooks to be implemented in RC3.



Donations are always welcomed to PayPal: marcoh64 AT gmail.com

Currently Supported Modules:

PM Workbench - Report PM

This Module adds a Report PM icon to the postbit when users are reading a PM. The reports and send to the PM Folder of the
userid defined to receive them. Administrators who are given access can read the reports, the original PM, and add notes to them.

Features:
- Access to the PM Reports is controlled in your config.php for added security
- Add report button to PM's, no template edit needed.
- Usersw can give a reason for the report.
- Reported PM's can be seen without modifications to them (PM's are not forwarded, but just added to the inbox of the report userid).
- PM's are fully parsed
- Notes can be added to reports.


PM Workbench - Read/Search Private Messages

This Module let administrators who are given permission, search and read PM's

Features:
- Access to the PM's is controlled in your config.php for added security
- PM's can be searched for:
- Keyword (title and/or body)
- Username (sender/receiver/both, optional exact match)
- Send date after
- Send date before
- With a simple click read the PM and see who still have it in their folders.


PM Workbench - Performance Pack

Add extra indexes to the pmtext table for faster searching.


Known limitations:
The 'Report PM' module might not work on some heavily modified Styles. I will be (hopefully) posting another (beta) hack for that tomorrow.

[Darth Gill]

Marco did e-mail me the plugin to remove the link when I proved to him that my board already informs members their pms may be read. I just thought everyone should know. I will install the workbench now when I get the opportunity. Thanks Marco.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Your welcome, please click Install once you have it running (that should be in 2 minutes from now )

[wcbryant]

Originally Posted by MarcoH64

Your welcome, please click Install once you have it running (that should be in 2 minutes from now )

Marco, have a stray thought/question that your hack got me thinking about. Not sure if it's in the scope of what you're doing here, or if I should be posting in mod requests, but I'll start here.

One of the things my users ask for most frequently is more email-like handling of the to and from fields. Particularly in the case of multiple recipients.

Ideally, if I send to 5 different people, it's an open conversation with these folks, and in order for them to respond to the group, I have to start the PM with "to: user1, user2, user3, user4, user5" so they might copy that on the response.

In a perfect world, if I put 5 people in the to field, then all 5 see the other 4 names as well, and of course myself as the sender. Then they have the option to reply, or reply to all. This would create a need for a bcc field of course, in the event you want some or all not to see who else is being PMed, but that would really only function the standard way vB handles this (hiding everyone else but the sender and recipient), so I assume it wouldn't require any new code.

A step up functionally speaking to that would be being able to PM to usergroup (primary or secondary) as well, effectively enabling closed discussion groups between different project teams (I have a community driven site), and the like.

Is this practical? Is it a potential feature of your workbench? Or *gulp* are these features available in another hack I've simply managed to overlook?

As long as I had it all fresh in my head, wanted to ask here. Mostly because the notion of one complete workbench that overhauls PM functionality seems personally more appealing than several different little ones that might overlap and/or conflict.

Another notion I had that sort of speaks to the privacy issue, is affording users the option of encrypting PMs. Giving another layer of privacy and protection would make it a lot easier to have some userbases digest the reality (with this hack) that admins can read their PMs. Obviously that would mean admins having 'content' on their site that they have zero access to, but it could be an optional feature.

I suspect I'm way off base talking about these here, as your modification seems to speak more to the administrative side of things than the user experience, but wanted to give it a shot.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Thank you for your feedback, all suggestions are welcome and i must say i really like the CC/BCC handling. (Actually vB = BCC, you want to add CC). I will give it some thoughts and if possible i will add it.

Closed discussion groups i am not so sure about yet.

Encryption is a different thing. Since 2 (or more) members must be able to encode/decode it, some encryption keys must be exchanged, that could be intercepted by the admin again, and thus given false sense of security. There have been more threads about encrypting/obfuscating private message.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Originally Posted by wcbryant

I suspect I'm way off base talking about these here, as your modification seems to speak more to the administrative side of things than the user experience, but wanted to give it a shot.

PM Report is both User/Admin, i am planning to make a User Search PM function, but the needed hooks where not available in RC2. So i am still planning on having a go at that too. More might follow.

[wcbryant]

Originally Posted by MarcoH64

Thank you for your feedback, all suggestions are welcome and i must say i really like the CC/BCC handling. (Actually vB = BCC, you want to add CC). I will give it some thoughts and if possible i will add it.

Closed discussion groups i am not so sure about yet.

Encryption is a different thing. Since 2 (or more) members must be able to encode/decode it, some encryption keys must be exchanged, that could be intercepted by the admin again, and thus given false sense of security. There have been more threads about encrypting/obfuscating private message.

Appreciate your receptiveness and responses. I see your point on encryption. I suppose if users were savvy enough, and really wanted to, they could use something like GnuPG to encrypt and decrypt in text windows on their own machines. Not something that needs server-side support, and frankly, if they need that much privacy, better to take it to email, or OTR-enabled GAIM, etc. Something off-site.

The to/cc/bcc stuff would be a dream come true. More than half the emails I send are to multiple recipients, where the ongoing discussion is something we all want the others in the loop for. Invariably, someone forgets to include everyone else, so the convo fragments, and it gets difficult to keep things linear.

Perhaps instead of PMing usergroups, people (admins) could set PM aliases for groups? Something like 'game_preview_team' is defined as 'user1, user2, user34, user765', where any PMs sent to 'game_preview_team' goes to all those people (I run a college athletics site). Although I suppose functionally speaking, that might be no different than mailing usergroups, and might require users to be created for each alias? I have no idea, not a coder at all.

The big thing was definitely the cc/bcc stuff, and I'm ecstatic that it's something you might consider.

Originally Posted by MarcoH64

PM Report is both User/Admin, i am planning to make a User Search PM function, but the needed hooks where not available in RC2. So i am still planning on having a go at that too. More might follow.

Outstanding, Users being able to search their own PM folder would be a terrific feature. I just switched over to fulltext searching down to 2 character terms on my forums, and everyone is loving that. Extending it to PMs would really save some time.

[Sovereign]

Originally Posted by MarcoH64

That would probably require polling each members mailbox. As long as it is local on the same server it could be done.

I am planning (or already in progress) a lot more Modules.

How 'bout something like Erwin's vB mail checker? Have members input server info, and just use the username as a forward (unless you actually have an account on my site, like sovereign @ alliancemodding.com then you could turn forwarding off). Cool hack! Keeping updated on this one...

[hydrostatic]

Report does not work. It gets me a no permission error when I click on the report button on PMs.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Could you provide me with a test account and a link please.

[hydrostatic]

Originally Posted by MarcoH64

Could you provide me with a test account and a link please.

I'm PMing it to you right nooow.