Auto reply vacation message for PMs?

kdouglas · 09-03-2009 12:41pm #1

Just an idea I came up with which would be useful for mods;
I've been away for the last week, and let my co-mods know before I left, however I received a couple of PMs from users who PM'd me directly and did not CC the other mods while I was gone about forum issues.

Would it be possible to add an auto reply message for PMs that could be set up for holiday periods?

Could be done via a Cron job every night/few hours maybe?

Make it mandatory that the user enter start and end dates for their holiday period so that it doesnt keep sending after they get back because they forgot to turn it off?

seamus · 09-03-2009 12:51pm

Actually, there'd be no need to cron it. Just a simple check when the PM is submitted - "SELECT * FROM pm_autoreply WHERE userid = <userid> AND NOW() BETWEEN holiday_start and holiday_end".

If a row is returned, you fire a message back to the user with the autoreply message on it.

There are a couple of caveats on this:
1. It would be a good idea to add a "Do's & Don'ts" to the setup screen - there is some information which you shouldn't really include in a autoresponder

2. Limit the holiday to 3 weeks or maybe a month. Someone might think of alternative uses for it and set it up for five years so that anyone who sends a PM gets a "Please wait, I might not respond for a few days" kind of thing.

Dord · 09-03-2009 3:46pm

Good idea!

Random · 10-03-2009 10:39pm

Good idea.

Maybe take it one step further (if Ross gets bored some Friday afternoon maybe?

) and make it so the system checks when the user was last active and lets the person who's sending the PM know? e.g. "Random hasn't been on Boards for a couple of days!" just as a notification or something? Maybe not .. maybe that's a stupid idea. Let's go with the OPs anyway

Auto reply vacation message for PMs?

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