Hoffi wrote: Another slightly different idea could be to let attendee specify the reminder themself. The registration form could be enhanced by something like "[ ] Send me a reminder email [X] hours before event starts" which could be stored in a new field in attendee db table.
To be more complete it should be possible for an attendee to edit this setting later - maybe by adapting the "unregister" form which could allow to unregister or keep registered but change reminder setting. Or maybe a fast access via My Attendances view not requiring to enter event details view.
Agreed. I don't want to start Spamming their inbox if I can help it..
My idea more detailed:
- user registers with reminder or edit reminder time
- value will be stored (as negative offset to event start date/time) in attendee record
- absolute date/time will be calculated and "next run reminder" date/time updated if required
("next run reminder" is a global value like the "last run" value used for archive/recurrence task)
- event's start date/time changes
- all related attendee records will be checked and "next run reminder" recalculated / updated as required
- attendees should always get an email triggered by event changes, so it's no problem if they already got a reminder email. But because the offset is then cleared they will not get a new reminder - maybe a problem?
Looks like it would be easier to just have a set reminder time* (once a week).. If the members want to able to control it, then it could be future feature. Most of the members are not website savvy and don't need a lot of options when creating events.
Right now, only the admins will get emails if an event is created or edited. If we could get it to email the attendees, this would be complete.
"next run reminder" time reached / over
- all attendee records will be checked by calculating absolute date/time
- relevant reminder emails will be sent and on success corresponding reminder offset cleared in record (on failure a retry counter should be used to limit tries - a second new field on attendee db table)
- "next run reminder" will be updated (simply using absolute date/time from next unfinished record)
Generally there are some issues we should keep in mind:
- Because there is no cron job running on the server a user must enter a JEM page (or any page of the site when using a system plugin) to trigger the reminder task. So there is no guarantee to get the email in time.
- The mailer plugin is "unsafe". Meaning there is no knowledge if emails are sent successfully. Users expect to get exact one email but mailer can't guarantee that. This makes it difficult to decide when the reminder can be marked as sent (also after adding some error checks).
- The task should be as fast as possible to prevent script execution timeouts. (that's a general issue, more important on the other emails with more recipients)
*Never thought about how the server will know what time to send the emails.. Maybe another idea would be to have all reminders sent out in one email, once per week. But, it would still need to know the current time.. I could do this manually until this feature is put in place.
We don't have alot of members as it's an invite only club. Currently, there are only ~150.. I can have our members advise if they got the emails or not during testing to see how reliable it will be until I can get a system in place to throw errors in a failed email attempt.
I agree about execution timeouts. I could have the "attending" check box be required, then only a certain number of emails will be sent out, in turn, speeding up the script. But, I think this is a bad work around if and when timeouts start occurring.
Sorry for the rambling, brainstorming as I type.
didn't forget this topic.