IM all members

[Mach8]

Like the feature to email all your members, I think the ability to instant message them would be a good idea. I personally would use it for announcements, sort of like a newsletter. I know some of my members do not use email regularly, but they use the forum on a daily basis. Would this be hard to do? I was thinking either you could have it use a wildcard to send it to everyone (although the query may not work with this) or have it cycle through all the member IDs and send IMs to them.

[Jedi~]

I think an easier way to do it would be just to add a link in the mod settings area and have it just link to the PM function but automatically put in all the users names, whether this would be practical or not I'm not sure, but it sounds easier. Maybe this can be my next mod, we'll see

[Krip730]

Like the feature to email all your members, I think the ability to instant message them would be a good idea. I personally would use it for announcements, sort of like a newsletter. I know some of my members do not use email regularly, but they use the forum on a daily basis. Would this be hard to do? I was thinking either you could have it use a wildcard to send it to everyone (although the query may not work with this) or have it cycle through all the member IDs and send IMs to them.

that is a great idea !

[Mach8]

That's one way to do it, Anonymous Jedi, but the only problem with that is if you have LOTS of members... I'm talking 500+. Either the textbox where you enter the usernames won't hold them all, or it'll be quite slow to process.

[thetaxiforums]

cracking idea

[Jedi~]

Mach, true, but do you have any other ways of doing it? Where it's any faster?

Although you are right about the fact that it might not hold all of those usernames, maybe it could be tested to see how many it can hold and just determine whether you have more members than it can hold, if it does it'll auto-create another text box continuing the line of usernames, although this may require a good ammount of changing to the IM system itself. Can't tell exactly or not because I'm just now starting to familarize myself on the workings of YaBB (would of started with gold, but I don't know Perl.) This may be a project for me later on, I'm not sure, we'll see if I have any ideas first and what goes on with my mute users mod.

[Mach8]

I don't see what's wrong with my initial idea of using wildcards... that way it would match up with all users. Just got to modify the query slightly to take this into account.

[Jedi~]

You know, I must of been really tired when I made the first reply, but your right, wild cards should work

[mediman]

best way is to use an wildcard like toallusers or something like that!

medi

[Mach8]

Looking at the instant messages table at the minute, it seems both a member ID and the member name is stored... so perhaps the member ID should be a wildcard and the member name be something generic like "Forum Members"

[groundup]

after you delete a member, does it recount the memid?  If so, you can just get the last id

[Mach8]

I've got an idea! I'll check the code in a minute but I think it would work by changing the query slightly.

At the minute (this is what I check) I think the query prints all messages to screen that EQUAL the logged in user's ID. What if you added in:

OR id= -456

The number is deliberately negative to prevent the forum tampering with it, and then the IMs could be sent to that ID... that way every member would get it in addition to their normal IMs.

[Greg Robson]

So long as you don't create multiple messages - that would bloat the database enormously!

[Jedi~]

groundup, there's a small bug with that. If it got the last ID number every time and just did a for loop until that number, you could have a lot of blanks when you have deleted a member. Remember, mySQL doesn't update the IDs, so if you were to delete member 3 you would be trying to send a message to someone that doesn't exist any more.

[Greg Robson]

With people wanting to send to multiple recipients, shouldn't the DB structure be like this...

instant_message
id
body etc.

IM_send
id_send (unique key)
id_from (from member ID)
id_to (to member ID)
new (has the user read the message)
deleted (has the user deleted the message)

This way you can have one copy of the message and loads of small records showing who has been sent which message.

N.B. You may not want the deleted field as it would be easier to delete the record, however this allows you to have a trash can facility