peaderfi

Just a quick suggestion on a way to improve the convertibility of bbcode to HTML and back:

Add a class attribute to the HTML that a bbcode translates to. Specify it as "bbcode<insertname>tag" and then alter the parser so that it looks for tags with this attribute and parses them.

Similarly you could wrap the HTML tags that originate from bbcode in HTML comments. Hell you could even make the comment identifiers unique which would aid parsing things like multi-level quotes. Then you would have the bbcode parser search for these specific comments and certain tags following them before converting the HTML into bbcode and vice versa.

 
We are using Mailchimp pretty active and have no interest of moving to another solution. We have close to 750k total users subscribed to our lists. Our forum is one of the biggest and active boards out there but our shop is the heart of our business. We have separate lists for shop , forum and other sides of our network. Mailchimp has key importance as it is tied to every system we use.

Currently on our board users can subscribe to our lists on registration , can update their mailing lists through user control panel and they can also be controlled through Admin/Mod user edit.
 
So mailchimp is a must for us and we will get it ready prior putting our board live.

We however decided to directly convert our system to IPB 3.4 so we will possibly delay our full conversion in second week of January ( if IPB 3.4 will be released within Devember )

That is understandable. I just thought I would suggest a potential alternative but given how invested you are I can understand not changing solutions. However getting campaign integration with IP.Board is something that could be done relatively quickly with a custom hook/set of hooks or an app. Both have their pros and cons in this case. I personally think a hook may be more appropriate.

There is a list of developers available, experienced with IP.Board and hook/app development, who could potentially take on such a project located here that you may wish to contact about this sort of integration.

I initially thought it was what we needed however it is not what we are looking for. We are using Mailchimp , not Mandril and IPB seems only to offer integration with Mandrill. All though we will investigate Mandrill pricing and evaluate it further.

We will still need to get a custom coded Mailchimp solution.

In terms of sending transactional emails (as in emails from the forum itself/Bulk Mail feature) Mandrill is the solution for Mailchimp (as Mailchimp does not appear to offer transactional emails outside of Mandrill).

I'm presuming when you are talking about Mailchimp integration you are talking about managing and setting up campaigns from within IP.Board itself as opposed to individual emails/sets of emails using the bulk email feature. It should be possible to code up a solution given their API.

There are alternatives to mailchimp that offer both transactional and campaign emails as part of one package, MailJet being the one I use. I haven't integrated the campaigns side of things into IP.Board myself but the transactional emails can use the SMTP settings that are already present in IP.Board without any need for additional coding on that side of things. They also have an API similar to Mailchimp for managing campaigns. The only reason I mention this is the added expense of two bills from Mailchimp (one for Mailchimp proper and one for Mandrill) compared to one from Mailjet that covers the same functionality.

There is another solution as well that may do what you are looking for:

http://community.inv...agement-system/

for both systems you can customise the awards icons/images.

The issue is knowing when to create a new support request and when to add a reply.

Currently, when an email is received, it looks at the address it was sent to - if it matches the incoming email for a department, it creates a new support request in that department. If not, it looks at the subject and tries to find a matching support request to add the reply to.

Now, that could of course be reversed, but we get people all the time who'll send an email to start a new support request and reference an old support request ID number in the subject - in this situation Nexus would add the new message as a reply, and often there will have been a long time in between the requests, so you'll end up reopening a really old support request.
The admin could of course split the new message off into a new support request, but I know from experience (it's how our old support system we used before Nexus used to work) that this is really annoying.

Given that I think most people nowadays understand that emails like that are being routed through a central system, I can't imagine many being confused/upset at sending an email to "[email protected]" and getting a response from "[email protected]" - especially as the alternative introduces an actual usability issue.

What about using an algorithm like this:

Email comes in:

• Does it have a SID?
  
  • Yes - Is that SID valid?
  • Yes - Check if SID is closed/has gone past date when it can be reopened
  • Yes - Jump to 2
  • No - Reply to support request
• No - Jump to 2

[*]No - Is it coming to a department email address?

• Yes - Open new support request in that department
• No - Check and see if we have any rules about the general email

[/list]