Revamp Bulk Mail

[Jason H]

Just in here as a note more than anything.. Next go-round.. Rethink the entire Bulk Mail system.

Right now, with it being tied to board activity, it's a huge headache from a support standpoint. Noone understands that there has to be board activity to have mail sent. What about a "Send Bulk Mail" button that will auto-refresh a window.. Similar to how rebuilding post content is done?

Would allow users to see script timeouts which would cause multiple emails to be sent.. As well as not tie the bulk mailing to board activity?

[Jason H]

And throw in Mass PM all users along with this..

I'd be shocked to see anyone who doesn't want that in.. And.. Having that feature would PROBABLY take a ton of load off the Bulk Email Feature. People would likely use the Mass PM before the Mass Email.

And this is another one that should be considered to be locked to the Root Admin account only.. Mass email and Mass PM should only be able to be done by the board owner. Not saying it should be.. But the idea has merits.

[Working4computers]

And this is another one that should be considered to be locked to the Root Admin account only.. Mass email and Mass PM should only be able to be done by the board owner. Not saying it should be.. But the idea has merits.

I like this idea :)

[Louis M.]

Make Mass PM a group option for admins to assign people to manage it. Otherwise +1 Jason.

[Jason H]

And.. This ties back to the something we talked of previously.. Adding maintenance for several tables in the database..

Specifically the message_topics and message_text tables.. I've seen forums with these 10k out of balance.. Possible with Mass PMs, but 10k out of balance?

Need an orphan PM text/PM topic tool. Goes through and text that doesn't match to a topic is removed and topics that have no text are removed.

[Louis M.]

I thought I heard somewhere that IPB 3 was going to contain a few more orphan tools. That would make maintaining the SQL tables so much easier. I can think of PM, Topic, Calendar (had some rogue cal entries from deleted calendar, might have been a bug) to name a few. The other thing may want to look at is profile comments too. Haven't really played to see if they orphan or not if an admin deletes an account, etc.