SMF Development > Feature Requests

A Methodology (Calendar or Other) to Auto Notify Members of Scheduled Events?

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Vince S:
In this related topic about birthday notifications http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=427704.msg3109945#msg3109945 I asked the question but it got unceremoniously duck shoved to the "bad luck" pile (which I do understand). However I have just missed sending a reminder about an important date and decided I REALLY need to find a way to set up an auto notify feature. The PRIMARY reason our social club exists is to encourage people to get involved and participate in person and so get out of the house and have a life! The secondary reason is for info sharing which of course the SMF forum is brilliant at, and an analysis of the Web stats in any month says it is very good at achieving that aim.

But that doesn't sort the primary purpose very well as it is totally manual and therefore liable to failure. In reality it should be totally automated with manual input by discretion. It could be that this means SMF is not the right tool for us.

Last time I posted about this I got a couple of entirely unhelpful responses. And searching the forums hasn't turned up any more relevant content. Is there any chance somebody could actually provide some useful content about any work arounds / techniques to achieve the desired outcome of auto notifications of calendar events? Thank you in advance.

The main content of my prior post was as follows:
I would like to send out automatic notices for upcoming events. The calendar in 2.0 remains very much as if it is a diary, gathers the info but you have to look. Way back when I set up WebCalendar (http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php) which allows to set up recurring events with a fair bit of flexibility which is very handy. However, whilst that software could send out notifications to groups / all users SMF is the core way we communicate with members, so I wind up sending newsletters out to basically say what is in the calendar since it would be silly to try and maintain two separate user listings.

What I actually do is put in a repeating event with standard text then edit the specific monthly activities with whatever we have decided to do. Because ultimately there is a fixed grab menu of activities I typically get the text from a previous event and put that up. It would be really cool to have a bunch of "event" topics posted and then have the calendar email the nominated one to the nominated list of recipients (by group obviously) sent by email according to the newsletter release rates a selected period prior to the event. Basically load the sucker once and let it run for the year, modifying to suit whatever might come up.

Very similar in operation to a birthday notice. There would be a decision on whether to notify conflicts when the event was added, the calendar we use notifies but permits them because we actually log a bunch of "related interests" events, in our case when MotoGP is on - it would be handy for people to be able to opt in to these "lesser" notifications but this is not core purpose stuff just a "nice to have".

Old Fossil:
There is a mod named Event Reminder if that helps.

Vince S:
Yes thank you very much Fossil, looks like just the ticket.

That would be here for anyone else looking:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2860

with the option to add this (must be installed first) to allow people to say they are going to attend the event and even deal with fees if applicable:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=3238

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