Yahoo Groups Email Distribution List hack

[anywhereanytime]

We are moving off a large Yahoo Groups Community to vBulletin. Despite ALL of the advantages of vBulletin 2.3 in our case over Yahho Groups, there is ONE BIG GOTCHA !! Yahoo Groups offers an "option" to receive messages via email either individually or in a digest and reply to a distribution list ... that then "integrates" back into vBulletin threads. This is obviously a historical LISTSERV carry over from Yahoo's purchase of eGroups and the old dial-up days where many business people still scramble between flights to quickly connect online and DL all of their emails to read OFFLINE on the flight. Plus, a carry over from the old ListServ/Distribution list email mentality versus a 100% online Community environment.

We've all been there, done that. Anyway, old habits are hard to change, and some of our group members - too large to ignore - are not ready to "make the leap" to a 100% online message Forum. We have scoured the hacks here for a solution. We have seen many discussion threads regarding the need for this type of add-on, and even inquired to the vBulletin dev folks ... but NO LUCK.

Anyone know of a solution ??? This could be a KILLER HACK to switch an existing Yahoo Group to vBulletin. We estimate that there are easily over 1 MILLION existing Yahoo Groups !!! Terrific opportunity for a vBulletin PAID ADD-ON !!

Thanks,

Scott

[Talisman]

Don't have the links handy but there is a hack that lets members receive email notices of posted message..... with the text.

There's another hack that allows members to reply/post to a thread by email..... the coding in the subject line directs the post to the proper forum.

There are similar hacks the provide the same option for our private messages.

Using other hacks..... admins can receive email notices when someone tries to access the site using a banned IP.... when a new member registers (allowing the admin to review and save profile info remotely), and when someone attempts to access the admin cp who's not supposed to be there.

You might try searching here for different phrases using "email notice" as a key word.... in various character strings. You'll find a lot of nice hacks that way.

Your members would probably also like receiving the community bulletin (another hack) by email.... which reminds emailers to visit the site online once a month or so in case they forget it exists.

Don't laugh, but our community got it's start back in the ONEList days, then endured the transition through eGroups to YG. And I've still got more than 12,000 messages stored in our old groups from years back that I haven't been able to transfer anywhere.

Once you make the move..... don't be too quick to drop the group owner/moderator address. If you set up your new vB forum/website, you can invite inquiries to INFO@yoursite.com and have vBulletin route those messages to your current yourgroup-owner@yahoogroups.com email address. Thus, all admins/moderators helping you manage your community will get these messages right away........ You still get the YG tracking of the originating sender/IP address in the headers that way.

Have fun with it.... you'll really like the difference.

Cheers!

[anywhereanytime]

Talisman ,

Thanks for the great comments. Been offline for a bit to get our main business sites up (www.mobileroadwarrior.com is our main business). But, back to your comments ... we showed our client vBulletin 2.3 running and they really liked it.

So NOW, it's just a matter of integrating the LISTSERV type email functionality for the small number diehard Yahoo Groups members that won't change in the beginning. Two questions:

1) There are only two hacks we need to meet a Yahoo Groups busting spec. The first is this optional email "subscription" with text and an email "reply" with text. Apparantly vB3 has an enhanced "subscription" notification service to include instant/daily/weekly email notifications. I posted an inquiry on the vB3 forums and one of the dev guys said the notifications will be quite robust but will not have a text option - I looked at the vB3 forum.

Any hack ideas ??

2) Second, we need an online SUBSCRIPTION PAYMENT option with PayPal and the one included in vB3 is excellent for what we want. It also includes a GREAT way to develop different levels of PAID subscription.

Therefore, we would really like to jump over to vB3, but need this email capability with vB3 IF POSSIBLE ??

From what we have read there are potentially MANY others that could use this same functionality - calling all hackers !!

[Talisman]

Hi again.

You won't be the only one around here wanting all those features. Most of the real experts are already testing the beta.... and finding out what they'll need to do to get all our most important hacks updated.

So, once vB3 goes gold, it shouldn't take very long before we'll be able to install the custom features we want most ....... once again.

Besides, I can't see ever losing email messaging completely. It's always easier to (discretely) glance at an email copy of a forum post or PM from your mailbox while at the office than it is to visit the site online.