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Search by sent private messages

Started by FragaCampos, February 27, 2013, 03:17:56 PM

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FragaCampos

I never managed to find a way to search my sent private messages. I can only search in my inbox.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to search in sent messages too?  O:)

Oldiesmann

When would you need to search for something in messages you've sent?
Michael Eshom
Christian Metal Fans

Arantor

To look back and find where you said something. Has happened to me before now.

Antechinus

Me too. To me it makes no sense to be able to search inbox but not outbox.

FragaCampos


Sammil

It would be quite useful for my forum

FragaCampos

As this been discussed any further?


NanoSector

Should be in the core imo. Along with searching in labels.
My Mods / Mod Builder - A tool to easily create mods / Blog
"I've heard from a reliable source that the Answer is 42. But, still no word on what the question is."

kat

I meant for anyone wanting this for the current version. :)

FragaCampos

Welll, I put it in here precisely because I think it should be in the core.  O:)

szinski

Bump.

Having the same issue on my forum. Can't search sent items in my Inbox.

Any news on this?

Kindred

you're not having "the same issue"....  it's not a BUG....
this was a feature request. 

At the moment, it does not look like it is in 2.1
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

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emanuele

Well... the fact that is "not a bug" is debatable. :P


Take a peek at what I'm doing! ;D




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margarett

Actually I see no reason for it is not allowed. I just lost 2 minutes looking at this, but if we change this
$context['folder'] = 'inbox';
To anything other than "inbox" it will search in Sent Items.

I probably overlooked eventual limitations, but...
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Justyne

As an admin I would love this to bits. Currently I copy all my sent PMs into a file I keep on my computer just so they are searchable.

I get a lot of requests via PM, whether it be about access to restricted areas, joining user groups, support, or staff applications, etc.

Quite often members resubmit requests when they think I'll have forgotten my initial decision on the matter which is when I start digging. XD

And I am sure lots of people here know answering a support query on PM and then regretting its nowhere you can find the second time that issue crops up.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Arantor

To be honest the entire PM system needs a ground-up rewrite anyway.

Justyne

I quite like it in general.

There are a few things though I would love to be there when it comes to PMs.

Being able to save drafts would be amazing for those lengthy things you don't manage to write in one sitting while quickly checking in for a few.

Having a more elegant way of templating would be useful for me to. I currently have a label "templates" with lots of stuff I PMed myself so I have standard replies to standard questions ready. I think that is very specifically me though rather than general useability.

And labels in general kill me and I can't say why. They are so permissive and let you do all you want, but my oldfashioned brain would be getting on better with subfolders a lot of the time that you could organise things into in a specific order. However, I think that is also just me rather than being useful to everyone. XD
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

NanoSector

I don't think Arantor means front-end, but back end. The front end could use some improvement as well though.

I'm not sure if in the PM system too, but drafts are implemented in 2.1.

I also honestly don't see the huge difference between labels and folders - both achieve near the same job.
My Mods / Mod Builder - A tool to easily create mods / Blog
"I've heard from a reliable source that the Answer is 42. But, still no word on what the question is."

Arantor

I mean both. The entire methodology is broken.

NanoSector

How do you feel it is broken front-end? (just seeing what you had in mind :))
My Mods / Mod Builder - A tool to easily create mods / Blog
"I've heard from a reliable source that the Answer is 42. But, still no word on what the question is."

Justyne

Not on my 2.1 test install yet so i don't believe they are just yet.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

NanoSector

My Mods / Mod Builder - A tool to easily create mods / Blog
"I've heard from a reliable source that the Answer is 42. But, still no word on what the question is."

Justyne

Apparently PM drafts have a separate check box that totally escaped me. XD
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Arantor

How do I feel they are broken? The entire concept of handling privacy as individual messages seems broken to me.

I'd far rather see it go towards being like XenForo has, where it's essentially a topic with individuals present, where you can invite people to the conversation and they can see the whole conversation.

Right now, you can have *parts* of a conversation - even the parts YOU wrote might be missing from that conversation. And other people might have BITS of a conversation.

Let me just clarify it for you. Under SMF 2.0:
A sends PM to B (message 1)
B replies to A cc'ing in C (message 2)

Message 1: B will have it, A *might* have it, depending on which PM mode they are in at the time and whether or not saving PMs was enabled. C will not have it (which might mean there is a lack of context)
Message 2: A and C will have it, B might (depending again on PM mode).


At least I had the presence of mind to do away with the 'save to sent items' checkbox so you will always have the messages you sent which fixes some of the above issue but the concept is still broken.

If, then, you have the concept of 'conversations', you can search them far more easily (since there's no separation between 'recipient' and 'sender' the way there is in SMF), you simplify the logic, and you end up with a much nicer presentation than the UI c-f that is the current PM UI.

Justyne

That's an interesting idea actually.

How would you see that working if somebody intentionally only wants to share part of a conversation? I think that situation would occur quite often.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Arantor

Then you copy/paste it, pretty much like you'd have to do now anyway.

Kindred

I both have some points of agreement and disagreement with this approach.

My biggest disagreement is that -- if we went and did all this stuff (in addition to all the other stuff that is getting finished and fixed) 2.1 will never get released. :P

that being said, The concept of "private" or "semi private" posts has come up several times...  and I see a point for it... but not necessarily to the exclusion/replacement of PMs.
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Arantor

Oh, I wasn't talking about doing it for 2.1. I stopped worrying about what should be in 2.1 months ago when I realised that too many people just want minor incremental increases rather than trying new things.

On the other hand, in my sandbox such a thing is entirely possible...

Note that semi private topics are a different concept to conversations but that's the quickest way of explaining it. Seriously, go look at XenForo and see how they do it. If you're not a member of any XF forum, use the main XF forum, and feel free to start a conversation with me there about it and I'll show you how it works. The only downside to XF's conversations system is that it has no categorisation, either in terms of folders or labels, but that's hardly insurmountable.

Justyne

I couldnt help thinking about this some more... what actually happens when one partner in the conversation starts deleting items? Does the whole history get sent to that person again when there is a new reply? Does it delete things for both?

It seems to me this could be quite data storage intensive especially for those with larger communities. I'd  think a 50 pm limit, for example, would fill up rather quickly this way.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Arantor

That's just it. They can't delete them. They can remove themselves from the conversation which is the nearest thing to deleting it.

I also think you're not grasping the nature of what I'm saying. It's not like you send the messages to everyone over and over. It is essentially a single unit - a topic, rather than a series of messages - that is available to people to read.

This is also why I specifically pointed out XenForo and invited people to try it there to see what I'm getting at because that's a live demonstration of the concept.

And no, you wouldn't have per-PM limits, you'd have per-conversation limits where any amount of messages in a single conversation wouldn't be a factor. As for space, you still only store each message once; it'd use no more space than SMF's current solution and likely would use less space in the long run.

Justyne

So if all people remove themselves they would get deleted then?

I am not entirely ready to let go of the space concern as I can see this being troublesome for larger communities.

For example, the production database on my community has 300MB. About half of that data is PMs and that is the community running on a 50 PM limit. I'd be worried what that size would look like if they all got to keep as many PMs as they wanted to.

The size is already unwieldy - though having shell I cope - but getting to that unwieldy might be a real pain for people who have to rely on phpMyAdmin or the internal SMF method of backup.

Not really arguing against it - it sounds like an intriguing concept. I'm just failing to imagine how this would not take up lots and lots of additional space.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Arantor

The space is not a concern, just as it isn't now, and that's why I don't think you understand what I'm getting at.

Even in SMF currently, no message is stored multiple times. If I write a message and send it to 50 people, only one copy of that message is stored. The message is stored once with a flag to say 'the sender has deleted it (or not)' so keeping something in the sent items is essentially free. After that there is a table to say who the recipients of a message are, and if someone deletes a message sent to them, it is that table which is amended, nothing more. Once all references to a message are gone, it should be deleted.

In my proposal, the space requirement would theoretically go down, not up, in ANY case. Because in my proposal we still have one copy per message *total*, but instead of tracking which individual message has gone to which users, we're only tracking which *collection* of messages has gone to which users. Instead of tracking it per message, we track a collection of messages, and we do away with all the *extra* tracking that makes conversation mode currently 'work' (by declaring that each message simply belongs to a conversation rather than each message is adjoined to another message implicitly under the hood)

I'm also extremely concerned with what you're saying because it doesn't tie up with what you've said before. If you've got messages of 100KB per message, you only need 10 of those to hit 1MB. Your forum seems like it has 50,000 messages which even on the standard average size in SMF would amount to around 50MB typically, let alone having any significant amount of larger posts. It just doesn't quite make sense somewhere.

But honestly... 300MB? That's really tiny in the scheme of things. Even the lowest VPS plan at my host (which works out at $20/month) provides 48GB of storage...

Justyne

#33
I think I must have done a poor job of expressing myself - or maybe I misunderstood you.

I was more worried what keeping every PM ever sent would do over time. That seems like an awful lot of messages to keep.

If I recall right the average user's forum usually stays under that magic 50MB mark when things like phpMyAdmin stop working or people run into issues like the database backup tool hanging up or being unable to actually open a backup in a text editor anymore.

Just seems like having a feature without a limitation mechanism could get people into quite inconvenient spots.

It's not like topics an admin could just prune.

(Well, I guess you could prune the table as an admin, but I don't think users would appreciate that.  ;D)

Not sure which community you pullled numbers from here as I have a few XD Indeed doesn't make sense here. <3

edit: just fixing spelling - it bugged me.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Arantor

That's where it gets interesting because IIRC, it's possible every PM ever sent could still be retained because I have a feeling - I'd need to check to be sure - that it isn't just 'if all recipients to a message are deleted', but only if the sender also has deleted a message (so, effectively, no-one has a copy of it), and sent messages aren't counted towards the limit.

The backup tool is unreliable even below 50MB, as it happens. phpMyAdmin is better about size that it used to be, so 50MB shouldn't really be a problem anyway. Failing that any decent host will offer backups anyway.

You'd limit it but you'd limit it to conversations rather than messages. Most of the time this doesn't significantly change things from what it would seem.

Justyne

Okay sold! Now who do we talk into coding it? XD  O:)
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Arantor

Well, it won't happen in SMF 2.1... I might work on it for Levertine if I feel up to it but there's a shortage of that going around at the moment...

AllanD

As I go through and see all these great ideas better and at the end I always see no matter who the poster is "You won't see this in 2.1".
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Arantor

That's because 2.1 was supposedly 'feature complete' last September and I wilfully and deliberately ignored that rule on several points in a semi-futile attempt to bring SMF into this decade.

AllanD

So now to get features other software has already,we wait for 3.0.
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KnD Hosting

Arantor

And then the team will demand there be another interim version in the years in the meantime, which is how 2.1 came about in the first place (seeing how smCore was supposed to be 3.0)

AllanD

I would much rather wait a little longer for 3.0 then to keep getting 2.1 is coming out soon.(which we all know it isn't going to be soon)
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Arantor

3.0 hasn't even been started. 2.1 is already 3 years in the running. The team seems surprised that I suggested we wouldn't see 3.0 before 2020.

Kindred

Arantor,

Please. Enough with the doom saying.

If it comes to be 2020, you can say "I told you so"
Until that time, please give me (and the rest of the team) some credit.
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

AllanD

I read that and it makes sense, if you ask people on niche forums why they don't like SMF. The number one answer is they are too slow and falling behind other software. Only good thing is mybb 1.8 it's anything to right home too.
Check out this great sites.
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Arantor

Why should I give you some credit? Everything that has gone on in the last 5 years absolutely supports my position, and before you give me the 'everything's changed' line, there's plenty of evidence to debunk that too, including an example only yesterday that nothing has, indeed, changed.

Same old merry-go-round. I will give you all credit when there is something to give you credit FOR.

Kindred

Sorry, Arantor... but you are just plain wrong. Time will eventually tell which of us is right - but until then, there is no evidence either way. I claim that you are wrong, you claim that you are right...   and we'll just have to disagree until one of us has ACTUAL proof....   and this continual harping is starting to really get my goat.
I don't have any issues with you, your conversational style or stuff that you've done... but you're starting to cross the line when it comes to the doom , doom, doom.

Think what you want, but please stop saying it in every single thread when anyone discusses 2.1 or 3.0.

Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Arantor

There is only no evidence if you're going to pretend that past evidence is utterly irrelevant in predicting future behaviour. I can't predict the future, but I can examine what is going on *now* and make a judgement based on that.

When I see strange changes that have not had serious testing, or indeed any testing, being applied, I begin to wonder.

When I see multi-page discussions about changes of terminology (just like yesterday so it's not a new thing), I begin to wonder.

I have to keep bringing this up because too many people keep pretending there isn't a problem or trying to ignore it. Or there's misrepresentation of the scope of the problem.

This topic is a great example. The feature request isn't going to happen until 3.0 happens, because of the scope lock on 2.1, not to mention that the design physically can't support it anyway. But given the situation that bred 2.1 is going to happen again unless you absolutely veto a 2.2 (and given you were a strong proponent of 2.1 as an interim release, I'm sceptical of this as you can probably understand)... even if 2.2 gets vetoed (which strikes me as unlikely), 3.0 cannot happen until 2.1 is finished, which means it won't start design until next year, realistically. Then it'll take at least 2 years to build, another 2 for in-fighting and then we start getting to 2020. This is what happened to 2.0. This is what has happened to 2.1 to drag it out to 3 years and counting so far. I see no reason to presume anything different is going to happen going forward. As such I think it's only fair to give people a realistic view of when this feature is likely to appear in an SMF mainstream release.

I realise you don't have any choice but to defend SMF against my comments, but even so, this smells an awful lot like quelling dissension by way of censorship, since the unstated-but-implied consequence is that if I continue to state my opinion based on experience of this project, I will be limited in what I can say and where.

Don't ask me to be complicit in this. Don't ask me to pretend there aren't serious problems.

Don't ask me to be silent for your sins. Give me cause to sing your praises instead.

Kindred

WHAT SINS?  I have committed no sins recently and, as the investor groups always say: past performance is no indicator of future performance...

as for 2.2 - it was originally part of the plan - when we had a separate team working on SMC and a separate team working on interim releases... in other word,s we could do the work in parallel because they were not overlapping resources.  THAT was the whole concept of the 2.1, 2.2, 2.x release structure.

Since SMC is dead, and 3.0 will be worked on the the current dev, there will be no further interim releases and all the focus will be on working on 3.0. That's what I have called for and that's what the Devs want to do... so we're on the same track here.


And no.... What happened with 2.0 and 2.1 is not what you describe at all. What happened with BOTH releases was that we had complete turnovers of the dev team (several times - for a variety of reasons). So, once again, you are approaching your argument for a skewed point of view.   (leaving aside why they left) If we had emanuele and spuds finish the release of 2.1, it would likely have been out last year. That didn't happen... and then you joined up and blasted in a bunch of extra stuff - I am not saying that you were wrong to do so - but by doing so, you did extend the dev cycles. and once again, you left, leaving your stuff 75% done... If you had stayed on to finish what you put in, there is a good chance that 2.1 would be in beta now.  I am not blaming you or emanuele or spuds for anything...  (although I AM blaming Norv for abandoning and killing SMC) merely explaining WHY it has taken the time that it does.

We're all volunteers.  If we were paid employees, I could demand results... but since we're not, we take the time and effort that people have to give to the project. However, the current crew is very strong and I have every confidence in them. I'm sorry to see that you don't....
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Arantor

QuoteThat's what I have called for and that's what the Devs want to do... so we're on the same track here.

We're still months away from that, and I'll believe it when I see it, specifically because I do not have faith that the team collectively won't demand a 2.2 knowing full well the time it would take to actually build a complete rewrite, plus all the in-fighting about how it's different to what's been done before.

Arguing the hypothetical what-if is largely a waste of time. What if they had? What if all the crap in 2010 hadn't happened? What if... what if... what if we stop worrying about what might have been and concern ourselves solely with 'where we are right now and where we are going from here'?

Yes, if Spuds and Ema had finished it, it probably would have been finished last year, depending on how much time and effort was spent in bug testing and bug hunting.

Yes, I put in stuff that I genuinely believed at the time was necessary. Yes, I'm aware it extended dev time, but it was still on course for 3 years even with the feature set as it was a year ago. In all likelihood what I did has not significantly changed anything because if I hadn't put in those extra features, there's still the many, many bugs that needed fixing. But we'll ignore that little part of what I did, because all I did was ignore the feature lock, obviously. Then again it depends on whether you care about pushing out a well tested and decently bug-hunted solution or not. Maybe I just have higher standards I expect to see.

I also see that nothing I said back in February has been taken on board about why I can't work with this team, which I'm perfectly willing to accept as my fault. Most things are anyway. Most things I touch seem to end up worse for my interventions, why shouldn't this?

You forget: my entire platform for joining the team was NOT to work on 2.1 at all. I felt pressured by the team into working on 2.1 in the first place. But that's because I believed 2.1 was stable enough to be a base for rebuilding into 3.0 and it took me way too long to realise that simply wasn't the case.

And the fact that the moment 2.1 is done, it's effectively obsolete because there's never going to be anything more than maintenance. No extra features. Probably not even bug fixes for the most part, reverting back to standard policy. (Again something brought up by the 2.1 comments, as from what I saw of it, not positively received)

I truly wish you the best of luck at this point. You're going to need it.

* ‽ adds another board to the list of things to ignore, knowing that nothing he says is worth listening to here, so will avoid seeing topics, therefore no provocation to say anything. Everyone's a winner.

Oldiesmann

Getting back on topic...

1. SMF 2.1 is not currently feature-frozen, despite what previous devs have said (different lead dev, different rules ;)).
2. This is definitely something I'd like to see in 2.1. Whether or not it gets implemented mainly depends on how much work is involved in doing so. I believe it should be fairly easy to do, but haven't had a chance to look into it. I should have time to do that in the coming days though.
Michael Eshom
Christian Metal Fans

dougiefresh

Ever since I saw this thread a few days, I've been working to integrate the idea into my Enhanced PM System

I started with the bit of info provided here (Thanks, emanuele!)  I've got most of the obvious stuff done, with exception of listing the recipients of the sent PMs....  I'll also have to make some changes to support the other functionality of the mod within the search function (sigh)...

Maybe it'll be ready in a few days....  Can't tell.  Best part is that I'll be able to release it as a seperate mod apart from the EPS....  Anyway, I hope this helps someone....  or at least gives some hope  :P


FragaCampos

Good news indeed!
Thanks for putting your hand into this, dougiefresh. I'll be one of the first testers for sure! ;)

It's nice to see people still struggling to maintain SMF going, but it's a bit sad to see and read the discussions everywhere between devs. I just hope SMF gets back on track and to the not so old glory times.


Quote from: dougiefresh on June 23, 2014, 06:17:45 PM
Ever since I saw this thread a few days, I've been working to integrate the idea into my Enhanced PM System

I started with the bit of info provided here (Thanks, emanuele!)  I've got most of the obvious stuff done, with exception of listing the recipients of the sent PMs....  I'll also have to make some changes to support the other functionality of the mod within the search function (sigh)...

Maybe it'll be ready in a few days....  Can't tell.  Best part is that I'll be able to release it as a seperate mod apart from the EPS....  Anyway, I hope this helps someone....  or at least gives some hope  :P

dougiefresh

Mod submitted today....  Search Sent Personal Messages (PMs) (Unapproved)

Also got this mod, with more modifications to integrate with the rest of the mod, into the Enhanced PM System.  Not yet released, but still working on a few other things....

dougiefresh

Just wanted to let everybody know that the mod has been approved!

Antechinus


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