vBulletin Mail System

[high]BEFORE YOU READ FURTHER, DO NOT INSTALL THIS MODIFICATION IN ITS PRESENT STATE. READ THE RELEVANT SECTIONS OF THIS POST FIRST IF YOU WISH TO INSTALL VBMS. I AM NOT OFFICIALLY SUPPORTING THIS MODIFICATION.[/high]

Note: For now, this thread will serve for all support questions. Obviously, the thread is going to get very long, very soon, and quickly lose any manageability. I hope to have a Premum Modification forum set up for vBMS, depending on whether the administration here supports it.

The vBulletin Mail System is now a free modification, instead of $40 to $48 (depending on the license). All features of the developer license (notes, etc.) are public as well. These files will be released shortly; they are not available yet.

For product information: http://www.webdesignforums.net/vbms/ .

What's attached to this thread?

The latest development version of vBMS, designed for 3.5 (incompatible with 3.0 in many ways, incompatible with 3.6 in a handful of ways). It is not to be installed in a live environment under any conditions.

What does this mean?

The forum at http://www.webdesignforums.net/vbms/forum/ will no longer serve as a support forum. If you have questions, you should do one of two things:

• Post in this thread ONLY. All technical, historical, and nearly all other threads should be posted here. In all likelyhood, I will not response to technical questions in this thread, and I will not respond to such requests via private messages or other means. By posting in this thread, tens of thousands of other users can help you in addition to me (provided they don't get there first and I have the time).
• If the question is personal for me only--no development questions--then send me a private message. Send the private message only through my site (http://www.webdesignforums.net/), not this site, so I can easily look up your customer history. Effectively, this involves billing only, or other licensing questions.

What about those who purchased the product?

When you bought vBMS, you were paying for the stable 3.0 release that has been around for over a year, and a 2.3.x release that has been around for much longer (since 2003). You still have access to those products (they will be released in the new forum). However, your license has been inherited to a standard open-source license: you may now install vBMS on as many domains and forums as you like, as well as freely distribute it.

Your input has also allowed a stable 3.5 version to be very close to completion. The expertise of the tens of thousands of coders who are now exposed to vBMS--which includes the developers of vBulletin themselves--will further improve the product to create a stable and full-featured product for vBulletin 3.5, 3.6, and beyond.

If your intention was to buy a 3.5 release, please note that it was clearly and repeatedly mentioned that a 3.5 version was only under development, not readily available, and that the version available was specifically not suitable for live use. I apologize if you thought this was different as I attempted to make it abundantly clear, including specifically telling people not to buy vBMS if they are running vBulletin 3.5 or later.

However, with this transition to open source, you will still get what you paid for, and faster: a stable 3.5/3.6 release.

Why go open-source?

To be honest, it is not fair to those who bought a vBMS license but have upgraded their installation of vBulletin to beyond 3.0. This will allow a much faster development cycle with support from many vBulletin modification developers. There are secondary reasons as well:

• Time. vBMS is well over 16,000 lines of code. Managing a product of that scope is simply beyond the several hours free I have each week to develop the product. Also, with Jelsoft churning out the vBulletin versions, developing a product that is dependent on frequent changes is extremely difficult. That is not to say that frequent new versions of vBulletin is a bad thing; it simply makes development difficult.
• Product scale. As mentioned above, vBMS is huge--far bigger than the majority of vBMS additions and even bigger than some of the version transitions of vBulletin itself.
• Reverse engineering vBulletin. As a factor of the two above, I am finding it increasingly difficult to develop for vBulletin. While I applaud Jelsoft for offering a product and specifically not mangling, encrypting, or otherwise prohibiting the viewing of its source (obviously, for customers only), there is still much to be done to favor strongly to developers who build products exclusively for their product. Others who feel catoring towards developers can help Jelsoft can see my request for a "developer license" of vBulletin.
• Fraud. As many people know, online software vendors are among the worst hit for credit card fraud, and it's extremely damaging: even if a thousand copies of a piece of software are sold, it only takes one single fraudulent order to leak the product, voiding, in all honesty, the majority of future orders. After putting a great deal of time into vBMS to see it stolen so brazenly, it demoralized me.
• Bad experiences. I have appealed several times to the community to hire additional developers, but the developers I hand-picked did not work out on these occasions. So far, none of the experiences has sped up development time, so paid outside help has not worked out.
• Personal reasons. I have changed jobs, taken on part-time work (I'm still poor), and even had a death in the family break up my work.

But the ultimate reason: I want vBMS to be available for all current versions of vBulletin so those who paid good money do not feel cheated.

What can and can't I do with an open-source vBMS in terms of licensing?

You can:

• Distribute vBMS to anybody you like.
• Modify vBMS to do whatever you like (excluding changing copyright notices), and then claim the changes as your own.
• Remove mentions of vBMS, the "vBulletin Mail System", or other branding.
• Develop special distributions of vBMS that you have extensively modified, and distribute those changes as a package
• Sell any components of vBMS that you have directly created (this is allowed, but discouraged). Only the components themselves may be sold, not the entire package with your modifications included.

You cannot:

• Advertise any of your modifications that you may be selling at vBulletin.org.
• Use vBMS for any illegal purposes, including use vBMS on a forum without an active vBulletin license.
• Modify vBMS to do whatever you like, and then claim the entire product as your own.
• Remove mentions of vBMS, the "vBulletin Mail System", or other branding, and replace them with others that imply you exclusively developed the product.
• Sell any components of vBMS that the product originally contained or others have freely developed.
• Sell the product as a whole, including a modified product.

What technical skills do I need to understand how vBMS works?

You need the usual vBulletin skills in general. This means PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS. You also should have a working knowledge of XML.

You'll also need to familiarize yourself with how MIME headers in e-mails work. If you want to modify how vBMS receives and routes mail, you'll need to understand the beast that is the imap library: http://www.php.net/imap . The imap library is only used to receive messages; sending messages has no dependency on imap.

Will you help with development?

I'll offer simple assistance in whatever free time I have--and I'll only do it publicly in the new forum. I will not write extensive parts of code for you or talk to you privately about vBMS. I will enjoy answering questions about how vBMS works at a high-level, and then you can see the inner workings to see how it's actually implemented.

So can vBMS actually be installed?

The version of vBMS that has been uploaded is the latest development version. It can be installed on a test forum, but there are several critical bugs that need to be resolved. You can browse the old support forums (http://www.webdesignforums.net/vbms/) for an overview of those bugs. I have a suspicion that they are simple fixes to you, the community with experience with vBulletin.

What is the first goal of those movement to open-source?

I wish to have a stable version of vBMS with little to no known bugs available for vBulletin 3.5 and 3.6 as soon as possible to appease past and present customers. Feature additions should come later; compatibility and bug fixes should be the utmost priority. When the stable version for 3.5 and 3.6 is available, then new features can be added. At the old forums, there is a list of feature requests, many of which have been addressed.

What will be my role in this?

As a user experienced with vBulletin development, both you and others will benefit from a stable 3.5/3.6 version of vBMS. That should be the priority. Feature additions, visual tweaks, etc. come later. Compatibility and just making it work completely with the features already present is the most important.

What remains to be done for a transition to open-source?

The version of vBMS attached to this thread is the latest one to which customers had access. It is still littered with copyright information and warnings about piracy. While the copyright information is still valid and will perpetually be valid, you can obviously ignore the piracy warnings. A proper version will be uploaded within several days that is fully suitable for open-source use.

Remember, this means that the piracy warning is no longer applicable, but the copyright information is applicable and must never, under any circumstances, be removed.

Any last thoughts?

As with any modification, back up your site files, but more importantly, your database, before proceeding. vBMS makes a significant number of alterations and new tables.

[filburt1]

Not one individual will take this project and finish it; the entire point of making it open-source is to appease customers who paid for it, mistakenly believing they were getting a 3.5 version, and never received the final version, only development builds as provided by the developer's license.

Instead, I expect quite a few developers to join in and assist each other (with my input as necessary) to develop the final product beyond what I could have done under the circumstances. Customers win because they will have paid $40 to $48 and gotten the final product, and what's more, the product beyond what was offered in the first place. New users win because they get a free, powerful, and community-driven web mail modification for their forums. I win as a result of the two factors just described.

The alternatives I considered:

1. Do nothing (always an option for any decision) and not look at the code ever again, just stating that the latest version is what's for sale, and that's it. That would piss off current customers, and there would be no future sales because vBMS would be incompatible from that point on with all vBulletin versions developed since.
2. Hire developers to continue, regardless of whether I broke even or made a small profit. I tried that twice, and it didn't work out.
3. Submit it to Sourceforge. I strongly considered that one, but I chose not to in order to restrict the codebase to vBulletin license holders, and to only expose the project to people in a vBulletin context.
4. Either give away or sell the codebase to Jelsoft. After consideration, they decided not to pick up the project at this time.
5. Submit it here. It would have the same benefits as submitting to Sourceforge, but would have greater exposure to vBulletin users.

You'll note that option #1 happened with HiveMail, vBMS's primary competitor, although I never planned the two to directly compete as I considered Hivemail to be a more full-featured product at the time, and it's standalone vs. vBulletin-powered. The same result happened: customers got pissed off, development didn't progress at all, and didn't get their money back. Hivemail hasn't been open-sourced to my knowledge, and from the posts I read, development is non-existent, and users are out far more than $40.

This solution, to reiterate, I chose to favor the community, not my tiny PayPal account and equally tiny checking account. This way, customers get a product beyond what they paid for, and future users are able to enjoy vBMS as well.

As for your discussion, Amy: I realize there could never be a dedicated forum for it (hosted here, that is; hosting it myself would not let me restrict access to vBulletin license holders). However, I can always try out the CVS server option. If you and others have alternatives, I'm more than happy to hear them. Anything to create an efficient collaborative environment, I'm all for.

Finally, I'd like this thread to be devoted to vBMS development, not arguments over the product's history or transition to open-source.

So, on that note, if somebody installs vBMS (and also to those who have tried using this version), let's start compiling a definitive list of bugs that need to be fixed.

A high-level list without specifics yet:

• Sending mail is not always reliable. It varies greatly depending on whether you try to send attachments. This is now because vBMS supports both attachments and HTML messages (along with RFC compliance of sending a plain text version of that HTML), so a multipart/mixed message is necessary. Some mail servers butcher those headers; I know under Windows and PHP, including the Comcast SMTP servers, the message would get butchered and never sent properly (despite PHP reporting success).
  
  If you can make a message that doesn't send properly, go back, check the option for "test the message without actually sending it", then copy and paste the output here; I suggest using the WYSIWYG editor here so it preserves the colors. Remember to censor out the important stuff (your e-mail address, for example), but keep the rest there, especially the headers and delimiters.
• Receiving mail does not happen automatically. It occasionally fails manually. First, we should get the manual process working, then the automatic, which should be trivial. To test mail manually, go to vbms_checkmail.php in your forums' root directory (not the one in /includes/cron which is the one that the vB cron system used to use). If you look at the top of the file, I recall there being a switch you can add to the URL to include output. If you leave off the switch, you can refer to the mail checking logs in the admin CP vBMS section.
  
  I suggest keeping it simple; just one user, no filters or anything fancy like that. Make sure you set up a catch-all account, nothing else like Outlook uses that account, and keep out things like attachments for now.
• The installer would fail for some users. I could never reproduce the problem, so the installer gives you an error message, post it in full detail. That XML error message is strange: try opening /includes/xml/vbms_installation_resources.xml in your web browser and make sure it doesn't give you any errors (if it does, the file might be corrupted because Firefox thinks its valid XML over here).
• Blank admin CP pages. I couldn't reproduce that all, but my suspicion is interference from other modifications the user installed. If you get blank admin CP pages, post a list of modifications you've installed.

[Paul M]

As I posted yesterday, when I installed this version it did not create the vb options setting "vbms_checkmail_interval".

[Slave]

Originally Posted by filburt1

The advantage over this implementation is that it can be set to run every n minutes. vB's cron system only allows every minute, or every given n minute.

For me, I'm be more than happy to have more than one cron job showing in the cron manager.

I just think, given the complexity of the code, people are more likely to be able to fix the old cron way of doing things because that is how people are used to doing things and have managed to get cron working, so why not this mod, instead of having to learn how you have worked your new cron before even trying to work out how to fix it.

[high]* Slave shrugs ..
[/high]

Given that it is now open source, am I allowed to give the older beta to someone to have a look at?

[filburt1]

I can post some earlier versions later (or just allow public access to the vBMS forum).

[Slave]

Originally Posted by filburt1

I can post some earlier versions later (or just allow public access to the vBMS forum).

Either one would be cool

In fact, allowing access to the vbms forums might be the way forward, to allow coders to chat about (and release) versions before release here at vb.org ..

[filburt1]

Just moving all discussion to the vBMS forums would be simplest, but the only thing holding me back is keeping out users who don't have vBulletin licenses. If Jelsoft provided an API for hand-chosen forums to keep out unlicensed users, that would be different, but they never will for customer privacy reasons.

[Slave]

Well .. people like vba and v3 arcade do it .. if I remember (it was so long ago that I signed up to their forums) they have a code string within a code quote on vb.org which has to be entered into the signup page of their forum ..

At least I think that's how they do it ..

[filburt1]

That does give me an idea (that one you suggested is too insecure because if the code is leaked once, it's perpetually useless), involving a data exchange between vB.org and my server. I'll need to give it more thought.

[Snake]

filburt1, I don't know how to thank you for realeasing it for free. Thanks a bunch! But is this going to work on 3.6.0 as well?

[FireLighter]

Hey,

This is a great hack, and I desperatley want to use it. But during installation I get this error:

Database error in vBulletin 3.6.0:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT phrasetypeid, title, product
FROM phrasetype
WHERE phrasetypeid IN (500);

MySQL Error : Unknown column 'phrasetypeid' in 'field list'
Error Number : 1054
Date : Saturday, September 9th 2006 @ 06:25:24 PM
Script : http://CENSOR/forums/admincp/vbms_install.php
Referrer :
IP Address : CENSOR
Username : FireLighter
Classname : vb_database

What should I do?

Thanks,
-Josh