Project beginning

[supermansrf]

I want to revisit this and give those interested an update. I have employed someone to bring this functionality back to AF. We have a working model that I am beginning to test.

I honestly haven't figured out how I want to proceed on this one. Mainly because it took a lot more money than I expected. I'm just being honest with everyone here and want to get this out in the open.

How many of you are interested in this feature and how many are willing to help assist in the development cost? I have never done something like this before so i'm not entirely sure how to proceed. But I can assure you that those involved in financially supporting this would most definitely have a say in how it moves forward.

Currently the plugin takes an email notification and will accept a response via POP3 mailbox. It will then place the reply on the proper topic on the forum for all to see. I have avoided being able to create new posts via email simply because the mechanics behind that just doesn't seem to have any clear pathway to get the post in the proper location. For example on GIT or Codeplex, when you create a new topic it just gets dumped in the pot with the rest. When you have multiple forums, how would you guide a post to the proper forum? It would have to be some complicated system of tagging the subject line of the email with not only the subject but the proper (spelling and wording) forum name too. I don't see that being a huge thing but as I said anyone else who wanted to get involved in this could also have some guidance on the final project.

I want to open up discussion on this topic and see how much support/demand there is out there for this feature to return. Feel free to posts comments questions.

[benjironelson]

Regarding how to get a new post to appear in the correct place, I believe in the old MC it would use a different email address for each forum. i.e. generaldiscussions.forum@domain.com and support.forum@domain.com

[PaulCam]

Hi Seth,
Thanks for following this up. I agree with Ben's(?) comment above. The original AF and MC used a different email address for each Forum and that determined where it would end up. A new topic in a forum was simply added to the top of the forum. This would be good to keep in the MC.
Paul

[supermansrf]

So how would you deal with a setup with 75+ forums? You would really have an email per forum? Then what happens if someone made a spelling mistake? I keep thinking about codeplex and git. I have NEVER sent a new issue via email. I have replied to many using email.

Honestly where I am on this is that we are paying a developer to do this work. I do not have the ability to do it myself or I would. If someone wants to contribute to the cause I will ask them to do whatever. If I am solely going to foot the bill for this, it will end up functioning the way we see fit until I release it publicly then whoever wants to can add to it on their time or dollar. I hate to do this, but I just can't keep shelling out money to have features added to this that we won't use. I was really expecting to have a dozen people posting here inquiring about this. So far it seems its just us and Ben :-)

[frozendnn]

What kind of work have you done so far? Do you have a feature list? Maybe I can fund a bit.

[supermansrf]

Sorry frozen I missed this somehow. It is very basic at this point but it works well. You get a notification and reply. It parses the content and posts back to the thread. As I said above, we have so many forums that making this so that it will accept new posts is just ridiculous for our purpose. Assuming I had the patience of setting up that many emails and creating all of those pop mailboxes, that requires my end users to get the spelling of the forum/email address correct etc. I have a hard enough time getting them to hit send after typing.

The other problem that I am running into at this point is that there is a bug with the tapatalk plugin that is affecting the subject of the post on several emails. I have narrowed the bug down to the quick reply feature and android (iPhone quick reply crashes the app). But the subject line gets stripped off the email and just says re: If you reply to one of these it does not work. So I have my dev working on fixing this bug before we can even begin testing.

I have more money tied up in this feature than i wanted. It ended up being a lot of work. But when it works it works well. I'm going to have to wait on the tapatalk bug to be fixed before we can make much more progress.

It seems that with ANY of my dnn projects, i'm ALWAYS waiting on something to get fixed to allow me to update something else, which allows me to upgrade etc etc etc. I have been trying to get one site off 6.1.5 for 16 months now. Driving my crazy :-)

I would love for someone (or more than one someone) to help share the financial burden of this. I'm probably going to end up having to fund this personally and not from my budget.

[PaulCam]

Hi Seth,

I’m not sure what the difficulty is here. When the administrator sets up each Forum you are asked for an email address. It is part of the administrators required fields in the control panel. The first post is distributed with an address that simple needs to be replied to by the recipient. A new topic in that forum doesn’t need a new email only the reply to the already established forum. This ensures that the mail about say ‘bible studies’ doesn’t end up in the ‘property forum’. It also means I can choose who gets to see a particular forum and provides security. All topics in the forum are available to those authorised to view the forum.

Regards

Paul

From: Seth Folickman [mailto:notifications@github.com]
Sent: Monday, 12 May 2014 12:02 PM
To: supermansrf/AF_MailConnector
Cc: PaulCam
Subject: Re: [AF_MailConnector] Project beginning (#1)

Sorry frozen I missed this somehow. It is very basic at this point but it works well. You get a notification and reply. It parses the content and posts back to the thread. As I said above, we have so many forums that making this so that it will accept new posts is just ridiculous for our purpose. Assuming I had the patience of setting up that many emails and creating all of those pop mailboxes, that requires my end users to get the spelling of the forum/email address correct etc. I have a hard enough time getting them to hit send after typing.

The other problem that I am running into at this point is that there is a bug with the tapatalk plugin that is affecting the subject of the post on several emails. I have narrowed the bug down to the quick reply feature and android (iPhone quick reply crashes the app). But the subject line gets stripped off the email and just says re: If you reply to one of these it does not work. So I have my dev working on fixing this bug before we can even begin testing.

I have more money tied up in this feature than i wanted. It ended up being a lot of work. But when it works it works well. I'm going to have to wait on the tapatalk bug to be fixed before we can make much more progress.

It seems that with ANY of my dnn projects, i'm ALWAYS waiting on something to get fixed to allow me to update something else, which allows me to upgrade etc etc etc. I have been trying to get one site off 6.1.5 for 16 months now. Driving my crazy :-)

I would love for someone (or more than one someone) to help share the financial burden of this. I'm probably going to end up having to fund this personally and not from my budget.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub #1 (comment) . https://github.com/notifications/beacon/6101506__eyJzY29wZSI6Ik5ld3NpZXM6QmVhY29uIiwiZXhwaXJlcyI6MTcxNTQ3OTMwMywiZGF0YSI6eyJpZCI6MzA3MzgwOTd9fQ==--5fc3f355a0a9d888126a9ddb70d001fe27fa9596.gif

[supermansrf]

I understand what you are saying, on a small scale that works fine. However consider:

I have one site with 20 forum groups, each has 2-9 forums under them. You are telling me that I would need to have one email address configured per forum. Currently I have one email for all forums. It is set in each forum group and all forums under are set to inherit. Regardless, that means that you also would have to configure the email account somewhere because each forum you want to accept these will need a separate email address and working mailbox.

Your forum users must be geniuses. Mine can't remember how to log in. Nor do they understand: do not reply. I get on average 15 emails a day where someone responded to a forum notification.

I realize that you can reply to an existing notification, but that also means that a newly composed email would have this function. If your user sent an email to biblestudy.forum@website.com rather than biblestudies.forum@website.com the post does not make it to the proper forum.

The reason that I didn't bother with this was mainly because of the overly-complex end user experience and the fact that I really don't want to give my users more reasons not to come to the website. The convenience of being able to respond to a notification email and eliminating the 15 "lost post replies" (the ones who reply to the do_not_reply email I stated above) was my number one priority. And I wanted to get something out there before I started adding a lot of bells and whistles.

As I've stated before, until we can resolve the issue of the phantom "subject line removal" bug caused by the tapatalk plugin, this feature is basically worthless. This condition breaks the functionality very quickly.

Does anyone around here have any experience with other forums who have this ability built into the forum? (doesn't have to be DNN - just looking for the example

Paul - I'll reply to your email directly too.