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New Applicant Idea.

jaredbjaredb
edited May 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
Tell me what you think of this? When a new applicant applies for membership it sends the board admin a notification e-mail. (I dont know if it does this yet) Then have the ability to approve the member via e-mail by replying to the e-mail w/ a yes or no answer. The reason for this would be to approve members when you arent near your computer. (ie I am always travelling around staying intouch via blackberry.) what do u think of this?

Comments

  • KosmoKosmo
    It would add nicely to the features that other boards don't have.
  • blizeHblizeH ✭✭
    It'd be a nice feature, but is it possible...?
  • hutsteinhutstein
    edited May 2006
    I think it would be only possible, with cronjobs, because how could the vanilla else automatic receive mails?
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    It does already notify admins when new applicants apply. The main problem is validating that the response email came from a trusted source. The from & reply-to addresses can easily be spoofed, and without a php session, there's not really any way for the application to know that the person approving actually has permission to do so. I guess you could do something like generate a unique 15-20 digit key and put it on the applicant's account. If that key is provided when approving or declining, it can act like you're a trusted source. It would be pretty hard to spoof that. The only other difficulty is writing the code that accesses incoming email and parsing it. And after that writing the documentation on how to set that up.
  • ithcyithcy New
    I think it would be only possible, with cronjobs, because how could the vanilla else automatic receive mails?

    procmail of course :)
  • jaredbjaredb
    its just a theoretical idea. as you know i clearly do not have the knowledge on how to do something like that. (refer to my php thread.) as for a work around cron jobs... maybe instead of replying to the email have two separate links emailed to the admin. click on of them to approve, and the other to deny.
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    Yeah, piping incoming mail to a php script would do the job better than cron, but even so the extension would require a lot of complex server setup (compared to an average vanilla extension). I thought blackberrys could browse the web?
  • jaredbjaredb
    bb's can browse the web. but its pretty painful.
  • ithcyithcy New
    it's really not that bad, as long as your host runs procmail or exim. most do.
    supposing you set up an email account like myspecialvanillaemailaddress@mydomain.com:

    .procmailrc for procmail:
    :0: * ^TOmyspecialvanillaemailaddress |/usr/local/bin/php /path/to/my/vanilla/extensions/some_script.php
    OR .forward for Exim:
    #Exim forward if $local_part is "myspecialvanillaemailaddress" then pipe "/usr/local/bin/php /path/to/my/vanilla/extensions/some_script.php" endif
    you just pop one of those files in your home folder, depending on which one your host supports, and that's it. or something close to that. i haven't messed with them in a while.
This discussion has been closed.