Mass PM by list or usergroup

[Eolesen]

This is something I'd hoped that vB would have done by now, but how hard would it be to have a form based trigger to generate PM's based on either a list provided by an input field -or- by a defined usergroup?

My forum has a file download library as a core part of it, and occassionally we have updates to a file and want to notify anyone who had already downloaded that file in the past couple weeks (fixes rarely come more than a month afterward).

Right now, my solution has been to create a standalone HTML page using your mod for a pre-filled PM (https://vbmods.rocks/forum/vbulletin...efilled-editor) and creating one link for every userID, a chunk of Javascript to pop that in a window I can use to post the PM, and a chunk of Javascript to put a green checkmark after it.

I'd like to find something more automated so that I don't have to generate the standalone page (which I could do using a form post) and click on every link. That's fine for a small list of 15-20. Anything more than that, and it gets a bit unwieldy.

[glennrocksvb]

Thanks for your suggestion, Eolesen.

Just to make sure I understand your request correctly: are you looking for two separate recipient selection methods?

1. Paste a list of users (user ids or username?) into a field,
   OR
2. Select a usergroup and send the PM to everyone in that group.

From your download library example, it sounds like you already have a list of users who downloaded a particular file, so I'm guessing the first option is the one you'd use most often. Is that correct? But if you already have a list of users, is there a reason the existing PM system doesn't work? Is it because your list contains user IDs instead of usernames, because you're exceeding the maximum recipients allowed in a single PM, or for some other reason?

For supporting usergroups, what do you think about extending the existing PM compose form so it supports sending to an entire usergroup, similar to how email clients let you send to a group?

[Eolesen]

If I paste multiple users in a single message... I'm assuming it's treated as a single message where everyone can see who else is in the recipients. That's a bit of a privacy concern, so individual messages were where I landed.

I don't think there's a BCC style function, or maybe I'm just misunderstanding how this gets handled and everyone is getting their own message.

I could put them into a temporary usergroup for the purposes of the message generation. Which.... is something that should already exist in the core code, but I digress....

[glennrocksvb]

I could add a checkbox that says, "Send PM individually" if there are multiple recipients and then add {username} placeholder support in the PM body to dynamically insert the recipient's username.