News:

Want to get involved in developing SMF, then why not lend a hand on our github!

Main Menu

[Declined] postings via emails (yahoo! groups!)

Started by assad, April 26, 2004, 04:33:24 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

agridoc

As I am going to do a major change from a Yahoo! group active since 2001 to an SMF forum, I did a search in this forum before adding my request for the option of message posting through e-mail.

I was happy to see that other people have the same option request.
I do understand that this is not an easy thing. I have read that at PHBB are working towards this target. It is a nice option. As I have experience I can say that it is an excellent feature.

Talking about spamming and security I can say that yes we had some spam attacks but nothing serious. Altough I am new to SMF I see options that can make it vulnerable to spam messages. More freedom to the user' s option makes every message board system more vulnerable. Restrictions make it somewhat safer but the forum can have a bitter taste.

I am feeling that the programmers in SMF already are thinking if not working at it. It will take some time but it will be available.

There are already some limited posting options.

I think such a mod or major upgrade would be welcomed by many.

Regards

agridoc
  For Greek aeromodellers and our friends around the world  - Greek Button sets for SMF - Greeklish to Greek mod
Δeν αφιερώνω χρόνο για μηνύματα σε greeklish.

[Unknown]

Well, I've been working on something in 1.1 that *MIGHT* make REPLIES to pms and posts possible, but I highly doubt it will be plausable for posting new topics, or even worse editing posts :P.

Happy peoples :P?

-[Unknown]

Anguz

I don't think it's too much to ask of the members to visit the forum for those, or is it?

Now we'll need the importers from those services to SMF! lol ;D
Cristián Lávaque http://cristianlavaque.com

Winters

On my Yahoo groups, I cannot edit posts either (when you are used to forums, this is really bothersome), so I don't think the group based people would miss that feature...

scottnath

I have seen this feature in another board system (http://discusware.com. In the discus board (which runs on cgi and I have recently switched to SMF because of that), it sends an email to each user for boards that the user has selected in their profile. The user email has the most recent post at the top, with NO attachments, with the following message at the bottom:

Quote

------------------------------------------------------------
INSTRUCTIONS FOR POSTING A REPLY BY E-MAIL:

1) Use your mail program to compose a reply.  Be sure to quote the entire message when you reply.

2) Delete the placeholder below and enter your message between the lines.  Do not change or delete any of the other quoted text.

3) Send the message.

--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--\/--
[Delete this line and type your message here]
--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--/\--

Use this link to go directly to the discussion:
   http://tpsonline.org/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?3254/17241


------------------------------------------------------------
Please do not change or remove the following line: /3254/17241/20026/admin/coBdj8P6pZSDg
------------------------------------------------------------



Typing something in the 'Delete this line and type your message here' area and sending the email sends it to a pop3 box. The Discus software checks the box (by a normal pop3 signin) regularly (ours was set at 5 minutes) either through a cron job or by an include on a high traffic page, then put only what was between the '--\/--' area and ignores everything else. This system worked FANTASTIC and helped raise board use. I had the script on an include on an unrelated page so it was not a drag on the boards themselves. It's the section which reads:
QuotePlease do not change or remove the following line: /3254/17241/20026/klepto/coBdj8P6pZSDg
which I assume gives the security to the system. "klepto" is my username, which the line is using, so you need BOTH username and email to go with it as well as whatever the code is at the end. The system does not accept new posts, so ONLY replies are allowed, which I thought was fine.

-Scott

[Unknown]

That's exactly the ugly way of doing it I'd like to avoid :P.

In my opinion, SMF is better off not having the feature at all than doing it that way.

-[Unknown]

scottnath

Ok, but couldn't it be a package mod that is completely voluntary to add? My users really want it.

Or more basic at least...is there an easy way to quote the body of the lates post in notification emails?

Anguz

Quote from: scottnath on February 22, 2005, 06:55:09 PM
Ok, but couldn't it be a package mod that is completely voluntary to add? My users really want it.

Or more basic at least...is there an easy way to quote the body of the lates post in notification emails?
Quote from: [Unknown] on February 22, 2005, 02:19:44 AM
Well, I've been working on something in 1.1 that *MIGHT* make REPLIES to pms and posts possible, but I highly doubt it will be plausable for posting new topics, or even worse editing posts :P.

Happy peoples :P?

-[Unknown]

:)
Cristián Lávaque http://cristianlavaque.com

moleboy

#28
Quote from: Tobias Eigen on January 26, 2005, 10:32:21 PM
I join you in being very surprised there is not more support for bi-directional communication features in forum software, and agree completely regarding supporting "legacy" users. I also love the idea of bridging the communities and seeing what amazing things might happen, and see tremendous benefit myself in participating via e-mail but knowing there is a very useful archive online that I can access any time I like to browse/search past postings via keyword or topic thread.

What can we do to bring this functionality to SMF?


Our group has members in countries where access to the Internet is slow and unreliable (e.g. Africa, Indonesia) and those guys would really appreciate being able to participate in the forum discussions via email, whilst our members in countries with better communications infrastructure would use the web-based interface.

We would require members to be able to post new topics by email & reply to existing messages, with or without attachments. Members using email would not need the ability to edit their previous posts.

I could probably scrape together some funds from our members to help develop this feature; are there any developers that would be interested in making this available, and what would be the target amount for the development fund?

Would any other posters in this thread consider donating some money to this development fund?

[Unknown]

Quote from: moleboy on March 17, 2005, 08:09:05 PM
Our group has members in countries where access to the Internet is slow and unreliable (e.g. Africa, Indonesia) and those guys would really appreciate being able to participate in the forum discussions via email, whilst our members in countries with better communications infrastructure would use the web-based interface.

Well, don't forget that there are other solutions to that problem:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?wap2

(specifically designed for slow and unreliable internet.)

-[Unknown]

pulpitfire

i don't know how big your group is, but another thing to consider is a lot of hosts seem to have strict limits on how many e-mails you  can send from their syst

Tobias Eigen

Hi all -

Just checking in after a few months away. I remain interested in this functionality. It's important to me, and it's not just about making forums accessible to low-bandwidth users but to bridging between those who prefer using their email client for reading/posting to discussion groups and those who want to use forum systems. 

An update on my explorations:

1) phpbb's mail2forum (http://www.mail2forum.org) is now in beta release. I haven't tested it but it's promising.

2) a lengthy discussion on this subject has taken place on the mailman-developers list - http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2005-February/017756.html

3) a number of people are interested in Mambo-integrated newsletter/discussion list spaces. Discussions are ongoing.

4) I learned recently about efforts to make dgroups.org open source: http://toronto.penguinday.ca/DGroups

Cheers,

Tobias

ps - any idea why I'm not being notified of updates to this thread? I've got "notify" on but have only now seen these posts now that I've come back here to look at the messages.
Kabissa - Space for Change in Africa
http://www.kabissa.org

Joomla Website, Mailman mailing list server, seeking SMF/Mailman integration a la Fud Forum (http://www.fudforum.org).

http://del.icio.us/tobiaseigen/mail2forum

Tobias Eigen

Hi all,

There is a new patch for mailman (http://www.list.org) that has been released to specify a "third party archiver" - it was developed with http://www.mail-archive.com in mind, but could potentially also work with a smf/maillist gateway. As I understand it, the patch effectively adds a hidden email address to the subscriber list and also changes the default link on the list homepage to the external archive.

Cheers,

Tobias
Kabissa - Space for Change in Africa
http://www.kabissa.org

Joomla Website, Mailman mailing list server, seeking SMF/Mailman integration a la Fud Forum (http://www.fudforum.org).

http://del.icio.us/tobiaseigen/mail2forum

Patrick Egan

I implemented a reply by email option to my current forums (UBB) that I'd really like to have for SMF. I only allow reply by email. New posts must be made from the site.  I really hacked it out before. It took forever for me to figure it out and I'd love some help doing it for SMF since it would take me way longer to figure out the SMF scripts than its worth. If anyone cares to do so I WILL PAY FOR THE WORK.

It's really pretty simple and it also solves that SPAM problem

1 - People have the option to subscribe to each post (like SMF 1.1)
2 - Email subject contains the topic number ie...  [General] This is the subject - 12334
3 - When they reply they must keep the subject intact (at least the number at the end)
4 - I use an email to cgi gateway to parse the incomming email to do the following
     

  • When the reply comes back, the pgm parses the FROM address and does a lookup to see if its a registered member if not found its rejected
  • Parse the subject to find the post ID. If its not there then its rejected

5 - Pgm makes post on behalf of email address to thread identified in subject.

Anyone?
Patrick Egan
CM Crossroads
www.cmcrossroads.com

Quimbly

Can someone summarize this capability with the current version of SMF? 

I'm setting up a community site and was planning to use phpBB and M2F (Mail2Forum).   Do new versions of SMF have this capability?  If so, how extensive is it and what exactly can be done with it?

Thanks!


Grudge

Quimbly,

There is currently no functionality at all in the current version (1.0.3). In the upcoming version there is at the very least some possible hooks - but the actual capabilities haven't been developed sufficiently yet to actually do anything. I hope to look into this more in the future, but I'm currently very busy with many other things!

Grudge
I'm only a half geek really...

agridoc

I just post to remind that there is interest in this feature.

Sooner or later functional programs will be made. It' s something not to be left off.

It' s sure a major feature and think it should be high in priority.
  For Greek aeromodellers and our friends around the world  - Greek Button sets for SMF - Greeklish to Greek mod
Δeν αφιερώνω χρόνο για μηνύματα σε greeklish.

Mastiff

A feature like this would be awesome!  My requirements are somewhat less, perhaps easier?  I current moderate a listserv mailing list that has an associated web site - which uses SMF.  I really want people to switch over to SMF since I like it better than getting 50 E-mails per day that may or may not be of interest, but I'm having a hard time getting people convinced who are set in their old ways.  Here's my idea:


  • Run SMF and listserv concurrently.  I use "ease home", which means that L-soft does the mass mailings on their server, they also do really good spam filtering - we never get any.
  • Make SMF a recipient/subscriber to the list
  • SMF has to sort out incoming E-mails into topics based on the subject heading and "RE:", etc.
  • When someone replies to the topic or creates a new one (on a certain board perhaps), SMF sends an E-mail to the mailing list not to everyone
  • Not sure about getting to "from" field correct?  Should be possible I guess?

This doesn't seem very hard for someone who knows the basics of sending/receieving E-mail within SMF, etc.

What'dya think?  I know most people might prefer it all to be contained in SMF, but there are free mailing list software programs out there; the SMF part could be generic and the forum wouldn't get bogged down sending hundreds of E-mails.

It'd be uber-cool if you guys got something like this going.  :P
"If you're an ugly chick, you're basically the same as a dude... I mean, you're gonna have to work."

alitahir

Hello to everybody

I agree totally  with Tobias that maillist integration is a must have feature for SMF.  FUD people seems to be well aware of it. If they would provide  mambo integration I would  adopt FUD without hesitation. SMF's    additional features are  interesting but maillist integration is  a far  more important feature for me.  In my forum a have non english speakers (Turkish) and usually  they are lost in log-in processes of freeware mail lists. SMF with its turkish translation suits most of them. But a simple notice of a new post is not   enough.  It implies additional steps  for users to wiev the post content and even if this is a few clicks away it means loss of audience for me. Considering that my forum is private and password protected it  necessitates an eleborate log in for most of them.  Cookies and other ways of easy logins wont work. Because some of them dont manage well the finesses of such  procedures. etc.  I would really really love to show the content of  latest post immediately in an e mail.

I would even accept some dirty hacks to solve my problem. I thought about creating a macro recorder script to check and send  SMF  main page link concerning latest 10 posts. There  we have a good presentation of last posts. Macro recorder would do some silly copying and pasting and  in a most primitive way would use outlook to distribute it to my members. As you see I  need desperately  such a fonctionality. Maintaining a separate outlook replica of mail adresses by hand is a small price to pay for me.


Or  I would love to find a way to hack notification post. We have there the link for tle last post.  Why not to have the content instead of a link.  Thinking that this could be done easily I fiddled in SMF, without apparent success.

Any idea about how to do this hack?

Any new information on maillist integration?

Thanks

alitahir

Hello again folks

I read your valuable discussion. But  just imagine that mail list  function is  limited. I mean  you have to post in forum but you can have also an e mail- digest of last posts to read on. In this scenario you can not reply to forum via e mail.

This approach suits the reality. Most  active users are present in forum and they would contribute in forum easily anyway. An unidirectional  Mail list can be a good option for passive users  who prefer to  read just  the content in an orderly way without navigating in forum  topics.  Since  the mails are not bi directional, you avoid spamming issues.

Thanks





Quote from: assad on April 26, 2004, 04:53:05 PM
Yes you do get some emaisl that may contain a virus but it can be prevented if email postings have some restrictions. Its doesn't happen very often.

Here are few suggestions:

1. The feature only accepts emails from registered members
2. All members who need this feature activated need to be verified via email before it's enabled.
3. All messages that arrive via email are not allowed to contain any attachments; the attachments are removed.

As far as the Spam goes; If some registered member is posts the Spam, he/she can be banned. (i have to this activity on my yahoo group but its like once in couple of months and maybe one or two cases)

Regards
Assad.

Quote from: [Unknown] on April 26, 2004, 04:36:44 PM
As to emailing posts, I have looked at this many times and the biggest problem is I can see no way to prevent spoofing and/or spam.  Don't you get virus emails every now and again from people you know, when they didn't send it?  I'm not sure how one would prevent the emails like those from becoming posts.  It just seems like a security problem to me.

Currently, there is no way to add a "mass" number of members through an interface, but it could be done with a script if you have a comma separated list of their details ;).

-[Unknown]

Advertisement: