Mini Mods - Email Reminder for inactive users

AS OF MARCH 16TH 2013 - THIS ADDON IS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED DUE TO INSUFFICIENT TIME AVAILABLE. THANK YOU ALL FOR USING THIS ADDON AND FOR YOUR SUPPORT. IF YOU OR YOU KNOW OF ANYONE THAT WOULD BE ABLE TO PICK UP WHERE I LEFT OFF ON THIS ADDON, PLEASE DO SO. I'M RELEASING THIS ADDON TO THE VBULLETIN COMMUNITY TO UPDATE AS NEEDED.
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What does it do?
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This mod will send out reminder emails to inactive members to encourage them to come back to your site.

I also want to give full credit and thanks to the developers of the previous versions from which this was derived:
technom8t (Email reminder for inactive users 1.0.0)
C Braithwaite and djbaxter (Email reminder for inactive users v1.2.7)
robertjandreu (Email reminder for inactive users 1.1.3)

*** See Updates section below for new feature list per release. ***

IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS WITH THE ADDON, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THE INSTALLED LINK!! THANK YOU!!

Features
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* Turn product on/off.
* Set the number of days a user can be away from your site before being considered inactive. (Default: 30 days)
* Send reminder emails once and once only during any inactive period. (Default: Off)
* Edit maximum number of reminder emails sent totally.
* Set how often an reminder email is sent during an inactive period .
* Set reminder email format - TEXT or HTML.
* Set the reminder email subject. (phrased) (site must be placed in debug mode currently to edit, not translate)
* Set the reminder email body. (phrased) (site must be placed in debug mode currently to edit, not translate)
* Set the usergroups to be sent a reminder email.
* Set userids to exclude.
* Log inactive users that have been sent a reminder.

Install Instructions
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This was written specifically for VB4. The VB3.8.x version is here.

IMPORTANT BEFORE YOU INSTALL, IF YOU HAVE A PREVIOUS VERSION INSTALLED I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU BACK UP YOUR
CUSTOM REMINDER MESSAGE SUBJECT AND MESSAGE BODY THIS MOD WILL OVER WRITE THEM. ALSO, IN VERSION 2.x, REMINDER
MESSAGE CONTENTS HAS BEEN MOVED TO USING VBPHRASES. LOOK IN THE INSTALL.TXT FILE WITH THIS UPLOAD FOR A LIST OF
PHRASES USED IN THIS MOD.

1. Back up Custom Reminder Email Phrases that you have made.
2. Upload file in the upload folder to the forums folder on your server.
3. In your AdminCP:
a. If you've installed an older version of this mod prior to 1.1.4 you must uninstall it first as well as remove the files that came with it. I can not stress this enough.
b. Go to Plugs & Products -> Product Manager -> Add New Product.
c. Import the product xml from the zip file. (make sure to use overwrite)
4. The mod is disabled by default on install so you will need to enable it. Go to Vbulletin "Settings" -> Options -> Inactivity Reminder Emails.
5. Settings and the inactivity log viewer are also available on the left menu just above the users settings group.

History Log
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Update 2.2.1
* NEW : New plugin resets inactive members when they return to site.
* FIX : UserID field in inactivity log was showing 0, and UserID was not being added to the optout url.

UpDate 2.2.0
* CHANGE : Inactivity is now based on members Last Activity Date.
* ADD : Exporting the following additional values which can be used in reminder email templates. Check readme.txt in zip file for list of place holders.

Update 2.1.5
* CHANGE : Mod no longer has the option of adding a footer credit to the end of your website.
* CHANGE : Mod no longer has the option of adding a footer credit to outgoing emails.
* CHANGE : New Reminder Optout: Currently this is only accessable from emails being sent out.

Note: Please let members know that they may receive one more email at which time they can choose to optout/unsubscribe by clicking on the embedded link or copying/paste it into
their browser.

* FIX : Reminders were still being sent out incorrectly. I believe this is now fixed finally.
* FIX : Issues when emails were sent out had the incorrect "From" address and listed the host domain name. This should be resolved now.
* FIX : Issue regarding special characters in the usernames being added to the database has been resolve.
* NEW: New data fields have been implimented for keeping track of when reminders are sent out and how many a member has received. If you have a had this mod installed since version 1.1.4, it will look for those fields and rename them so you do not loose previous data in those fields, otherwise new fields will be added.
* NEW: I've added the ability to turn off the admin report. In this version, if it is enabled, you may receive 2 reports. One report for members that have never received a reminder and one for members who haven't received a reminder since the last reminder based on the frequencey setting in the mod settings screen.
* NEW: Reminder's sender and email address are correctly determined now. Should now reflect site name with the webmasteremail address as the reply to.
* CHANGE :Translations for 2.1.1 may not work for versions after since some templates and phrases have been removed.

Update 2.1.1 (6/24/2010) - German Translation - (Thanks Semmi)
Thanks to Semmi for translating the Admin menu, Phrases and Reminder Phrase Templates to German.

Update 2.1.1 (3/30/2010) - Bug Fix
* FIX - Removed extra where clause in query where scheduled task script was performing an update when inactive reminders where based on last post count.
* FIX - Email Phrase Templates - Changed $bburl variable to $forumurl to correct a broken unsubscribe link.
* NEW - Includes tool to reset the date and count of reminder emails that were previously sent to users. This tool is mainly for testing purposes.

Update 2.1.0 (3/26/2010) - Bug Fixs and some new features
* Edit number of emails send totally
* Choose whether inactivity is based on members "Last Post" or their "Last Activity"
* Keep a log of all inactive users contacted
* Opt-Out Feature for members - Include an opt-out link in reminder email. (Thanks to Gene Steinberg)
* Added a link to the bottom of the default email template phrases that members can use to unsubscribe from reminder emails.

Update 2.0.1 (03/15/2010 9:00pm) - Bug Fix
* FIX - Issue related to processing users in a batch configuration. Mod was checking for a field length greater than zero instead of a numeric value greater than zero.

Update 2.0.0 (03/15/2010) - Complete rewrite of mod
* NEW - Can specify number of users to process during nightly scheduled task.
* NEW - Send reminder emails in either text or html format.
* NEW - Email subject and message body uses vb phrase templates. I've included sample content in email phrase templates so all you need to is customize as desired.

Update 1.1.4 (03/05/2010) - Initial release for vBulletin 4.x
* FIX - Would continue to send out email more often than specified intervals due to incorrect setting in cron job.
* NEW - Exclude userids from processing.


IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS WITH THE ADDON, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. THOSE THAT HAVE NOT INDICATED THE MOD IS INSTALLED WILL BE A LOWER PRIORITY.

PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THE INSTALLED LINK!! THANK YOU!!

PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO NOMINATE.

If you like this mod and it has helped your site, and would like to see more features added, please consider donating.
Your support is very much appreciated! Thank you - Thank you

[K!nG]

Hmmm i had to uninstall it before for some reason (can't recall) now installing it again on 4.1.4 hope everything works fine this time

[aileron79]

Hi TalkVirgina!

That mod indeed undoubtedly is really useful. I just installed it a couple of days ago. This morning the script ran for the very first time. I limited the amount of mails to be sent to 200. However, 120 messages were bounced back with invalid addresses.

I am not familiar with common mail server setups and I definitely want to avoid the disaster described by Mary. So what is a safe amount of messages to send at once? Does it make any difference if I send out 1000 messages once a day or if I configure the cronjob to send out 250 messages four times a day? However, currently there are only 1800 users to be reminded, later it won't be more than 4 a day at maximum. Edit: Forget that, found another interesting article: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=1533552

I just read that you are working on a bounce detector. However, the last two log columns (valid email, bounced) are all green even though 120 of 200 messages bounced back. What exactly are the values in those columns meant to express at that stage?

One more simple feature request: It would be good to see if users returned after they have received a reminder message. Just join the user-table to the log and show the lastactivity value in the log table. maybe red for not returned and green for returned, depending if the lastactivity timestamp is larger or smaller than the one the message was sent at.

Further, users obviously have to have the modify-cronjobs-admin-privilege to access the log. why is that? Is that restriction necessary? Isn't there a more suitable privilege?

The idea of creating a bounce manager plugin is great as long as it handles not only mail sent by this plugin but by the forum itself, like pm notifications or birthday greetings. The user's mail address should be removed from the user table if it is discovered to be invalid, the user should receive a pm that his address is invalid. Maybe those users can even be moved to another usergroup as long as they have not entered and verified a valid address - and moved back to the original one after they have a valid address again... Well, I'm dreaming but maybe you can make this dream come true?

However it really is a great mod, thanks you invested so much time for development and support here, you're doing a great job!

[TalkVirginia]

Aileron,

I should have more time to reply to your post this weekend. Sorry. Things have been very busy.

Jim

[weexto]

Hello, What numbers do I put in "Number of Emails to Send Reminder Per Batch" to make it work properly?

[TalkVirginia]

Originally Posted by weexto

Hello, What numbers do I put in "Number of Emails to Send Reminder Per Batch" to make it work properly?

Start with 10 and see how that goes through. It you don't see any bounce backs then increment it by 10 or whatever number you feel comfortable with.

[weexto]

Originally Posted by TalkVirginia

Start with 10 and see how that goes through. It you don't see any bounce backs then increment it by 10 or whatever number you feel comfortable with.

thank you !

[TalkVirginia]

I've got my computer back up and running... however it looks like I may have lost a ton of data on my raid drives. I'll most-likely be spending the weekend trying to figure out how to recover from that. Just an FYI.. will keep ya posted.

[TalkVirginia]

Oh btw, the good news is that I didn't lose any of the work I did on this addon. All versions were backed up on my development server. lol

[KittyWireless]

The unsubscribe link at the bottom of the emails that this mod sends out, seems to link people to a "smilies" page.... I took a few of the links from member's emails and try them myself and, indeed, it brought up a page about smilies on our forums.

How can we get properly working unsubscribe links?

Otherwise than that, this mod is AWESOME!!!

[TalkVirginia]

Originally Posted by KittyWireless

The unsubscribe link at the bottom of the emails that this mod sends out, seems to link people to a "smilies" page.... I took a few of the links from member's emails and try them myself and, indeed, it brought up a page about smilies on our forums.

How can we get properly working unsubscribe links?

Otherwise than that, this mod is AWESOME!!!

Can you post the link?