Sending a report post confirmation email to a user specified address.

[vesa_tahkavuori]

Hello,

My company runs Finland’s most visited website at iltalehti.fi. We also have a discussion forum (vBulletin 3.8.2) with millions of posts overall.

Due to changes in local legislation we now have to make some changes to the report post feature. I have understood that vBulletin has a built-in feature for sending an email to administrators and moderators when users report a post (e.g. a post that contains an illegal threat against someone). From now on when a user reports a post she should be able to get a confirmation email for herself, i.e. to an address that this person has specified in the report post form.

The person who was previously in charge of the technical side of the discussion forum has left the company and now I’m stuck trying to figure this out knowing almost nothing about vBulletin. I managed to add a text field for the email address and find the PHP handler for the form. But I would greatly appreciate any help if you guys knew how I could make vBulletin send a confirmation email not only to the moderators, but for this specific email address as well.

A built-in feature is probably preferable, but I’ll edit the PHP handlers as well if necessary.

Thanks so much for any help,

Best Regards,

Vesa Tähkävuori, web developer
Kustannus Oy Iltalehti

[vesa_tahkavuori]

I forgot to mention that the email should contain information about the post that this person reported, a simple "you have reported a post" is not enough for our purposes.

[vesa_tahkavuori]

Well, apparenty no one had any tips for this but I managed to get it done anyways. I got everything I needed by refering to the forms' post data ($_POST, including the user specified email address), $postinfo and $vbulletin->GPC from the form's handler. Then I just pass this to a custom class that I built in (vBulletin root) -> /includes/, the same folder that has the normal report item class. The custom class then builds the email message and sends it using PHP's mail() function. It appears that vBulletin has a custom mail function called vbmail() as well which should be better in some ways. I'll have a look at this later if necessary.