Force Input of State, City, Zip - Generate Mass Emails By Sorting By This Info

[FirstOverboard]

I am one of the founders of a political forum.

1) For the forum, it is very important that we be able to record the State, City and Zip Code of each member. This information should be requied at registration.

2) Also, as we have a quite a few members already, we need some kind of feature that will require that any member that attempts to log in who hasn't input their location information be prompted to do so before they can procede.

3) We also need the ability as administrators to generate email lists and/or broadcast emails to members according to their State, City, or a group of zip codes (like those in a congressional district). Some sort of an ehanced sorting feature of the current 'email members' page would be great as that feature works quite well  arleady.

I realize there is already some discussion on custom fields and that [Uknown] has done a nice little tutorial regarding custom profile fields. However, our needs require a little more work and I would think that these features would be of great value to many other SMF users out there...

Thanks for your support,

Jessie


p.s. One additional feature that would be absolutely awesome icing on the cake: Different member groups could have access to the ability to broadcast emails using different location criteria. For example, a "State Director Member Group" could broadcast a state-wide email by sorting members by State, a "Congressional District Director Member Group" could generate an email list by inputting the Zip Codes in their district. 

These member groups should not have the ability to actually create an email list but only to input a message and have it CC'ed to the members in their sort criteria. This way our higher leadership can broadcast to a large group, our lower leadership, smaller groups, and nobody would actually see the email list generated.

[mraspy]

I agree. I wish a forced input of City, State and Zip along with a Forced Realname available only to the administrator.

[Eliana Tamerin]

Use the custom profile mod for starters. You can include profile fields for City, State and Zip and require them at registration. You can also make them admin view only, in the case of the Real Name field. As for the rest, someone could probably make a mod that sorts people into membergroups based on their City, State and Zip, and you can simply email from those.