Personal Message to Groups

[LuminaRS]

I'm using IE 8 & FF 3.5.3

[Arantor]

Odd, it did work fine in IE 8 in testing. But I pushed a fix in 1.2 that should force it to work if Javascript is enabled.

[LuminaRS]

Uninstalled and deleted 1.1
Uploaded and installed 1.2
Everything works great!

[Arantor]

Awesome, I thought the hotfix I added would nail the fringe cases, and it seems that it does

[Rafferty]

Am I pushing our luck by asking if we could have the abilility to choose between "To" & "BCC's"?

[Arantor]

Not impossible to do but not trivial either.

The only way it would be viable is all or nothing to/bcc.

Reason being that if you pick and choose to groups and bcc groups, what happens if someone is in two groups, one of each - should they be 'to' or 'bcc'?

[Rafferty]

fair enough, its just the address block looks horrible filled with a thousand addresses lol

[Arantor]

I hadn't thought of that!!

But then again, I only ever tested with 3 users because that's all I have on my test install. Plus I'm also a former corporate drone, so emails with hundreds of email addresses in was almost the norm, rather than the exception.

Would just the choice of to/bcc for the entire groups section be OK or would per group be better? I'm happy to figure out how to do it provided that I can find a suitable solution to my question above.

[Cal O'Shaw]

Well, being able to toggle to bcc would be handy for those occasions when an Admin wants to send a PM to a user but bcc the rest of the Admin Team.

If a toggle that applies to all listed groups is what works, that sounds great to me.

[Arantor]

OK, here's a thought.

How about two checkboxes, one for to, one for bcc, per group, and if a user is in two groups, such that he'd be both to and bcc, he'll be visible.

Does that work for everyone?

[Rafferty]

Yes I believe that would be OK, yes that would work

[Cal O'Shaw]

Sounds great to me.  Grazie!

[Arantor]

Right, I'll roll that into 1.3, though that won't be for a few days as other stuff has to come first, but that seems like the best solution for everyone.

[Kimmie]

Is there any way you can add the function to be able to send to post count groups as well? This would really come in handy as an admin. (i.e. being able to send to a group who have not made any posts an expiry message letting them know their accounts will be deleted, etc, etc)? It would also be a benefit to the other groups to send out things such as newsletters because my host only permits x amounts of emails a day. IT would also help to be able to send out announcements, that they ordinarily would miss with them just being posted on the site as a thread.

Lots of reasons why I would use it

For "me", having it only work with non post count groups, is not much of a change since RC2.0 1.2 already has the ajax drop down so its nothing really, for me to send to all my staff when I need to without having to use this mod. 

[Arantor]

I can, I just chose not to, mostly for performance reasons at the time. Though with the changes made for multiple groups, there's already enough change in the query that expanding it to post count groups will be very, very bad if you have lots of users in a post count group. (By lots I mean > 500, and indeed if you have verging into the hundreds of thousands of users generally)

And actually, I probably wouldn't recommend using it for newsletters necessarily... for many users, they get PMs auto emailed to them (which this would also trigger...) however it will go into their PM inbox and still have BBcode formatting, I suppose.

The PM system was just not designed for sending to more than a few dozen users. Having the potential to send to potentially thousands is really dangerous for users, and it would likely require a refit for sanitisation purposes since it'd really screw up the PM display page and sent pages, only the latter in BCC mode (which is also on my todo list)

It's something I can do, but I'm extremely hesitant to do so as you can imagine.

[Kimmie]

yeah alot of that makes sense, too bad there wasnt a way to do it, and have the option for it to not send emails as well. Dont think there is any way around that tho.

Or have it so that when you select the group, it populates all the members and then you select which ones to send it to (maybe like 20-30 at a time). Something like how the Awards Mod is set up. When you go to give out an award, it takes you to a page to where you select the group(s) and then the next page populates all the members and then you select the member(s) to which you are giving the award.

I dunno..hehe. Just trying to make my life a little easier I guess hehehe. At any rate, hindering performance is something I would not want to do (took me a year and 5 different hosts to finally find one that is fast, and works well..lol). You are good at making mods and you know alot about SMF so if you think it would be better not to do it, I trust your judgement.

[Arantor]

Well, the problem with the above is that it means more than a little rewrite of the personal messages system, and I'm hesitant to sit and gut the system when it actually works pretty well.

The other issue, of course, is abuse. Imagine the hassle if you allow all users to PM groups (e.g. to contact the admins) and they send to all other groups...

The one thing I could see being added as a compromise on that is a permission to send to post-count groups, in addition to the other permission already there.

[Bodestone]

I have noticed a slight issue. The membergroups section only shows on the New Message page if more than one membergroup is assigned as being sendable.

I only have one membergroup which I wish to enable group messaging too and so it does not show up.

[Arantor]

That's a bug, definitely! Thanks for catching it!

To fix temporarily while I build the updated version, edit PersonalMessage.template.php for your theme (or default/PersonalMessage.template.php otherwise)

Code (find) Select Expand

if(count($context['groups_pmable']) > 1) {

Code (replace) Select Expand

if(count($context['groups_pmable']) >= 1) {

This applies to both SMF 1.1 and 2.0, and has been included in the next version.

[Bodestone]

Thanks for the fix. Saves me wandering around looking for the relevant file and searching for "> 1"