Ultimate Community Bulletin Mailer for vBulletin

[ArnyVee]

That sounds great! I'm glad that I contributed a little something to your great mod!

Can we have a look at the "ultimate community bulletin mailer"? Is there a sneak peek somewhere?

[Greg]

No preview on the mailer yet. I just finished the data selection. I will move on to formatting it now. Then we tackle the send loop. The send loop is where we are going to be above and beyond any mailers for vBulletin I am aware of. We can't have an app that causes the server to run a 300% while mailing. We've got that under control very well.

I built the send mechanism quite a while ago and patched it into a version of commbull I had maintained for myself.

Commbull is so inefficient in memory usage, queries and post data, it has to go. Commbull also breaks style quite a bit and handles the css poorly, html emails with broken css look bad. The preview of the email to send in commbull causes us to have to do more editing than we should have to do. We think we have that more efficient too.

Oh yeah, it will include a real nice bounced email handler too.

Anyway, there's some food for thought.

[ArnyVee]

Wow, this sounds great Greg!

There is a huge market for a newsletter product on vBulletin!

[Big Dan]

I didn't know you were working on this Nop, I wouldn't of bought the Gazette from vBGeek. I bought the product but still haven't installed it. .. Commbull blows I've got it installed but haven't ran it in over a year. Do you have a general ETA on your hack?

[Greg]

Thanks for the interest, Dan. I am coding my tail off. I want this out next week.

I've got the settings and message body creator done. I have all the queries and logic done for all the settings. Now I'm working on formatting and saving the forum data to go below the message body of the email. Then it's the send loop, which is code I have, and we test hopefully.

[ArnyVee]

Greg, any thoughts on how much it's going to cost?

[Greg]

It's going to be pocket money. What would you pay? I think I can beat the prices I have see for other vBulletin email apps by at least 10$ or maybe a little more.

[ArnyVee]

Originally Posted by noppid

What would you pay?

I think that I'd have to know the features before saying for sure. But, I'd spend $20 at least for a solid working newsletter feature.

[Greg]

Rest easy, we're on the same page price wise and feature wise. What feature are important to you?

[ArnyVee]

Personally, I need something that can auto-generate some forum data (latest members, latest posts, etc) as well as give me the option to enter my own news pieces or promotional pieces that I'd like to input (including both text and images) into the newsletter. I'd also like it to have both an online 'page' as well as be able to mail it to folks with the some 'look' as the site.

Plus, if it had an automated 'bounceback' feature to handle those, I'd be happy as well.

I'll think of more features that I'd like to have. But, those are the first right off of the top of my head.