Reinstate download of personal message threads

[crabpaws]

This was a valuable feature. It has disappeared.

I used to download pm threads that were sensitive, for potential legal defense and also to trace complex situations.

Please reinstate this feature. Download to a compressed file would be fine.

[crabpaws]

Just received this e-mail from a member, who is confused by many features (or lack of them) in our recent upgrade from 4.x vs 3.x:
 

Quote

 

Hope I'm not adding to your problems in dealing with the upgrade, but although don't need to email PMs to myself right away, I'm close to the limit and want to save copies before clearing them so others can reach me.

(I'm not here much anymore, but people do find my posts and send me PMs. So I try to keep some room in my inbox. But I email many PMs to myself because sometimes many months later people contact me again and assume I remember our correspondence and their situation/history, and often I have no recollection who they are! (I'm sure you're familiar with that problem!)

 

This is a good example of why download of personal messages is a necessary feature. Some forum sites are about more substantive issues than others and the content of personal messages is important.

[LiquidFractal]

Hell, I didn't even know you could do this in 3.x - where have I been?

But I agree - this would be personally useful for me in maintaining offline archives of client correspondence for many reasons, but as @crabpaws said, also "for potential legal defense and also to trace complex situations."

[AtariAge]

I get requests for this all the time on my forum.  Even though I have a pretty fair limit on PMs (I think 500 conversations? and considerably more if you're a subscriber), people still want to save important conversations.  Especially larger conversations that might run for a year or more, with many participants.  And we have many programmers on our forum developing projects through PMs, so there's often a need to save these conversations because they contain considerable technical information.  

Being able to archive conversations (such as downloading a nicely formatted PDF) would be ideal and a very welcome feature.  I'd upvote this more than once if I could. 

 ..Al

2 minutes ago, liquidfractal said:

Hell, I didn't even know you could do this in 3.x - where have I been?

I don't see any way to do this in my 3.4.x forum.  I think I did have a third-party hook installed at one time that allowed you to download an HTML version of a conversation, which saved you from having to save each page separately, but I no longer have that installed.  Probably was abandoned and broke in some newer version of IP.Board.  At any rate, should be a built-in feature, in my opinion. 

 ..Al

Man, I really hate the "auto merge posts together" feature.

[LiquidFractal]

3 minutes ago, AtariAge said:

Being able to archive conversations (such as downloading a nicely formatted PDF) would be ideal and a very welcome feature.

This would be very nice indeed, although the last time I checked in to apps for formatting PDF content (I believe when I was looking at Drupal and Joomla many moons ago) it was a bit of a dog's breakfast.  Last I remember there are no hard and fast guidelines for converting documents to PDF, and the handful of apps out there have their own ways of rendering images, tables, etc., and I was never able to get a satisfactory end result.  Hopefully by now I'm very wrong and things have evolved.

[AtariAge]

3 minutes ago, liquidfractal said:

This would be very nice indeed, although the last time I checked in to apps for formatting PDF content (I believe when I was looking at Drupal and Joomla many moons ago) it was a bit of a dog's breakfast.  Last I remember there are no hard and fast guidelines for converting documents to PDF, and the handful of apps out there have their own ways of rendering images, tables, etc., and I was never able to get a satisfactory end result.  Hopefully by now I'm very wrong and things have evolved.

Doesn't have to be a PDF, per se, even a nicely formatted HTML/CSS version you could open up in your browser directly (and then print if you'd like) would be nice.  It's been some time since I've looked at PDF-generation libraries, so I have no idea how mature they are.  Although at this point I'd hope they have evolved into something useful. 

 ..Al

[AndyF]

Regarding the "history" of this function:

From memory the very ancient 2x series offered an option to email the messenger content based on various criteria (date ranges etc) in either html or Excel format. The early 3.x series (possibly only 3.0.x) offered this option or something quite similar from what I can recall.

A third party hook offered this type of functionality in early 3.x versions too, possibly only up to 3.2.x, it might of been a DevFuse hook if memory serves correctly.

Later 3x versions did offer a built in "archive conversation" which would email a single conversation to the requesters email address. Its visible if you view a conversation its under the last reply/post window area.

I have not seen a plugin to offer this in the 4x suite yet that I'm aware of. It would make quite a neat third party addon however.

 

[AtariAge]

@AndyF, thanks for the history lesson.  You're correct, there is an "Archive Conversation" link wedged between the conversation and quick reply windows on my 3.4.x forum.  I don't believe I've ever used it. Just tried it, and sure enough it emailed an HTML version of a conversation to me.  Could use some nicer styling, but something similar to that functionality would be nice to have built into 4.x.  A third-party plugin could offer a more advanced archive feature (for instance, choosing the type of file that's generated, maybe some style options, etc.)  

Funny that I still get asked about this even though it's right there.

[crabpaws]

19 hours ago, AndyF said:

Later 3x versions did offer a built in "archive conversation" which would email a single conversation to the requesters email address. Its visible if you view a conversation its under the last reply/post window area.

That is correct, "archive conversation" was available for individual personal message threads, and has been in IPB versions since I became a customer in 2011.

Back then, there were extensive discussions in invisionpower forums about how to improve this download capability, in comparison with vBulletin, which downloaded whole batches of personal messages as a text file, which was hideous but did the job.

The 3x version "archive conversation" downloaded the personal message thread as a Web archive. I just opened one, this still works.

[Mark]

There isn't really a way for PHP to do this without timing out for large conversations.

[Jujuwar]

8 hours ago, Mark said:

There isn't really a way for PHP to do this without timing out for large conversations.

A solution, like Facebook or Twitter, doing it in background and send an email when the archive is ready with a link to download it. 

[crabpaws]

Old vBulletin used to send the whole kit and kaboodle -- all the active pm threads -- as a text file.

[crabpaws]

I am getting complaints from mods and members about not being able to download pm threads.

One of my members is very upset, she'd download pm threads and do off-line research, responding at length in the IPB message area later.

Can download of pms be restored in the next patch?

[AtariAge]

Now that I am running 4.x, I am bumping this, as I'm already getting requests from my members who'd like to archive conversations.  We sometimes have rather long conversations with lots of technical information (quite a bit of software development takes place on my forum), and it would be very useful for people to have the ability to archive conversations.  I'd much prefer this to be integrated into Invision rather than a separate plugin. And right now I only see a single plugin that offers this functionality, and I haven't tried it yet to see how well it works. 

Surely there is a way of doing this for larger conversations without having PHP time out?

 ..Al