UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Suggestions and Feedback Admin to PM all users

Right now the only solution is for me to email all users which is both a pain and creates a spam issue.

Could we get an option to be able to PM all users, perhaps from the admin panel? This internal mailing system would work much better than mass emails, and the admin could also set optional parameters as to who would receive the PM:

- users registered between X and Y
- users with postcount between X and Y
- users who have made at least one post since X date

you can do that by using the member search. once you have done a search for your members and the result set is staring at you, you just select to email them from the search results.

yes - but that would not solve the problem about trying to PM a group.

I would love to be able to PM just my moderators for example.

so just adding another option in the Action pulldown would do the trick then..

no?

probably

I run a similar site to Ian, and every so often we have an offer from someone to message all our users with a newsletter.

Unfortunately each time I have to decline as I don't want to send 10k emails to people, plus I think I should never send any ads to email boxes (plus many email addresses listed in users' profiles are out of date).

An internal PM solution would solve the issue as I would be able to send all my users a message without resorting to emails.

Curious how you'd handle users who specify they don't want to recieve PM's yet want to recieve admin notices ... If you're sending something important, the proper way would be to not send it

isn't it such that in 7.3, if an admin decides to PM someone they get it regardless ?

i even thought that was in 7.2.2

i might be forgetting something here though :shrug:

That would be the solution; but I'm not sure, hadn't attempted

An admin can pretty much PM anyone without limitation.

I somehow dislike the idea of masscommunication by PM, you got a forum for mass communication, and PM's, well, for stuff that only a few users have to see.

The ability to mass PM would be great. I love the idea and am surprised it's not already a feature.

Email can get buried in a person's inbox or marked as spam, as stated.

As obvious as it is to some, a global announcement post on the open board can easily be missed or simply ignored.

The individualized nature of a PM makes a person take notice and read your communication.

As an aside, I've previously suggested the ability to create groups in the PM buddy list, which ties into this. (Would be great for contacting mods, certain groups of users, etc.)

The biggest problem with emails is that a good 20% on any forum have probably got invalid emails.

People sign-up, then a year down the line change their email and then all mail bounces.

I get a lot of bouncing 'happy birthday' emails - most day I have at least one.

Perhaps we also need a system for verifying emails, so that anyone with an invalid one has to enter an accurate email before they can continue. Although I am not sure if this would ever be possible.

One idea I have seen on one site (not a forum) is being asked for an optional second email address in case the primary one ceased to work.

On this subject, I would also like to see any new email address having to be verified before it can be changed.

Are you guys looking for just a notification PM, or an actual PM where the sender is involved as well? If it's a simple notification like the welcome PM, we could probably look at something like that. If it's an actual PM where both sender and recipient are involved, if the admin sends it to his 10,000 users, he will instantly have 10,000 PMs himself

no - purely a notification PM

For example - many of our users have invalid emails - would be nice to PM all users asking them to check their email addresses.

It would be fairly easy to delete the PM's via an SQL command to save the database from bloating too much.

It might be possible, however I don't think it's really feasible with the current system. What I mean is, say you have 25,000 users. If you send out a PM to all of them, the DB would need to insert 25,000 rows into 3 different tables. That's a lot of database activity, and on some systems might even go into a timeout.

I think a better alternative would be to do something like we do with the new forum rules, where the user must accept them the next time they come online.

What we could probably do, is add some sort of system message function. Where you create one or more system messages that the user must view the next time they login.

The bulk of the time, it would be used (in my case) for much smaller groups i.e. admins and/or mods.

Great idea. That would work.

I do like the idea of system messaes... or you could build on the global announcements feature and add something like this to the cfrm ...

As part of that login maybe say once every 6 months the system will send them an e-mail to verify their e-mail address and they must reply otherwise the account will be disabled at some given time in the future.

Of course selectable by Admin as I'm sure many sites wouldn't not care to do that, but some would.

Hmm, so a long message would have to be basically copied and inserted 25,000 times into the DB, even though the message content would be the same for all recipients?

How could we make the admin PM look like any other PM in the list, but without the possibility of replying to it?

What if the admin could compose the message and it would be stored only in one place in the db, so each time a user checked his inbox this message would be pulled centrally (since the content would be the same for all users)? And then similarly to a regular PM the message would either be new/read/deleted by a user, so just a quick 0/1/2 type of setting?

The number of database entries might be the same, but the content of the message would no longer have to be copied over and over into everyone's inbox.

This should take the server overload out of the picture as we occasionally use db queries anyway to toggle yes/no-type settings for all board users at once.

If you would make the welcome pm replyable, every time a new user would sign up, you as the admin would have a new pm that was the welcome pm... it would get dirty, and your inbox could get huge...

Yes - but they would not be replyable

well, i was saying, IF they where to make it replyable the admin would recieve every welcome message and it would be replyable...

I agree that the system message that you need to read and accept when you login is the best idea for this.

You should be able to have as many as you want, with the board rules always being displayed first, then the next page displays either the first message, or they are cascaded so as not to annoy people that don't logon that often.

OR, perhaps those system messages could have an expiry date tagged to them, so if like someone suggested it was for an offer, that if that offer was timed limited then you could set that message to expire and thefeore not display.

I still think the message should look much like the welcome PM that everyone gets - basically it should look like any other PM, except that no replies would be possible.

And the content can be stored in only one place in the DB as everyone would get the exact same message.

The problem with that is the PM system is used for something it's not really coded for. It's not coded to have everyone get a message that only exists once in the database, so that's some major alterations to the PM system.

When we try to make things do what they weren't meant to do it means either rewriting large chunks of the code or ending up with a feature that doesn't necessarily work as efficiently as it should. In this case, it would need to check multiple tables (for announcement type PMs), need to know which table to read from depending on the PM type (regular or announcement). Need to keep track of who read and did not read it, etc.

It also leads to confusion. The initial welcome PM is a non-reply PM, but I looked at the DB recently to see how many new users reply to it anyways, you'd be surprised how many did. When people receive a PM, they naturally think they can reply to it.

Would prefer PM's to members or groups.

But perhaps also to have system messages, when people log on to groups might also be a good idea - but needs to be group based.

Rick, could the "global PM" work similarly to the welcome message that is used today or would such a feature require a total rewrite?

In essence all we need is a no-reply PM, but stored in once place. Is the welcome message stored in a single place or is it copied over and over to every new user's inbox?

That's what Rick has been talking about, the message would be inserted for EVERY user; so one "global pm' would be inserted in the db once for every user, which is a lot of new data to be shoved in the database at once; the proposal for a seperate feature is the System Message that Rick's talked about in this thread.

What about the creation of an all new PA (Public Address) that auto deletes once read by the user?

That still wouldn't change the fact that it'd have to insert the PM for every user which could bring a heavy load to the server not to mention could take up a lot of space depending on the size of the message (if the message itself where say 50kb, and you have 4k users, that's 4000 X 50kb for the PT itself (yeh, that's 195.31 mb) you'll end up with quite a bit of wasted space that will have to loop through every user to be inserted so it could take quite a bit of time to do in the first place); IMO the system message option is a perfect answer

bit of an overkill if you need to PM your mods or fellow admins, or once membership is easy your elite group etc.

That's why it makes sense to only store a message like this in one location rather than copying it over and over. Similarly to a global announcement topic which is only stored in one place, but visible in all forums.

The message would not allow replying, but apart from this it would show up in a user's inbox just like any other message (just as if the Admin had sent it manually). The user could delete it anytime he/she wishes.

The welcome message isn't stored in one location; the template for it is stored as a wordlet, however this wordlet is sent as a pm on account creation. Yes that's right, it's a standard PM.

But as Conrad says why can't it be only once.

The icon flashes - the use sees a new PM - opens the PM up, and the PM pulls in the system message relevant to that user.

It could be called a system pm or similar - but why shouldn't it just pull in the message once opened?

Just an FYI, I'm not arguing in that this wouldn't be a useful feature. I'm just looking at it from a coding standpoint.

What Ian is talking about, a small group of users, and what Conrad is talking about (sending to everyone) really are two complete different things.

We can definitely look at putting in a PM to group feature, as that would work well with the existing PM system, and it would just insert a row for each member of the group.

For the sitewide notifications. The way the PM system is currently written, this just isn't a very feasible idea. This really is a new feature completely, rather than just something that is going to be tacked onto an existing feature.

For example, deleting the PM. Since it only exists in one location, there has to be a way to track that the user deleted it. We don't want to insert a new row for every user when a new system notification is sent. So we can't just delete a row when a user deletes it. We'd actually have to insert something, to designate the user has read it.

How about implementing a system for groups similar to the agree to rules. This way they cant reply and will have to check a box that they have read it before going forward. Something set up like the email from the cp but instead it would be a system message that applies to the group or groups you want that message to go to when they next login since your only looking for a notification system?

I think that was mentioned 10 posts back

Sorry, missed that post.

LOL no worries

(just making sure I am over 15 characters )