Message Board Notifications

Hi,

I'm thinking about making a "message notification program" that would work with all sorts of forums that you subscribe to. It would show a message notification update message in the system tray next to the system clock when new messages are posted to the forums or replies to your messages depending on the preferences that you set.

I just wanted to know if anyone would be interested in this application. I haven't developed it yet, but just had the idea because I got tired of going to the message boards of sites that I liked checking for messages. I usually don't like having the forum e-mail me when new messages are posted since they fill up my inbox, and I get tired of deleting them, so I thought this application would be useful to other people besides me if I built it.

Thanks for any comments, feedback, etc.!

- Pros Chum
pros@codeedu.com

[RobAC]

Interesting concept. I'd possibly be interested.

[dwh]

cool.

Count me in too!

[Mentor]

I have been thinking about this also...but dont know an good languaes to do it in :-)....I woul dbe very supportive of it!!..Kinda like the MSN messanger thing?

[Freddie Bingham]

The forum owners are not going to appreciate you having the program refreshing the pages constantly looking for new messages..unless of course you have an alternate method planned to go about doing this.

I was thinking of doing it with C++ and MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) since I've been using those languages and libraries. I just need somebody to write a hack (since I'm not familar with vBulletin and only heard about it yesterday) that would allow me to call the "message notification check" page with the following spec:

File: NewMsgCheck.php

Inputs (via POST method):

$TimeCheck - return new topics since that timestamp.

Output (print to the screen no HTML headers or anything):

[Number of new topics to return]
[The new topic's title][newline]
[URL for the new topic]

This should be pretty simple to do. It will just be real simple for now to get things going, and other stuff can be added on later. If somebody could hack this up and e-mail me a link to the page to test the program on then I would appreciate it since I don't have vBulletin installed or know of anyone that does have it. Thanks.

Pros Chum
pros@codeedu.com

freddie: That's a good question. I didn't think of that one. I guess that would require modification of the above protocol and have the server "push" new messages out to registered clients. So there would be one PHP page that the client program would call to register it's IP address with the server. And everytime a new message is posted, the server attempts to connect to the client IP address that was registered and tell it new topics that was posted. The only downside to this would be that clients behind firewalls won't work since the server can't connect to clients behind the proxy.

[Sinema]

I'm sure this will be a pretty popular tool for hardcore forum folks :-)

Can't wait to see it develop