Requesting a rewrite of the PM system, make it email-style, add an outbox, additional ignore options

[Ageless93]

The PM system as it is now is a shambles. All PMs are on top of each other, they're all immediately in your face.

What I would like to get is the email system:

• opening my inbox I get a column with names of people who PMed me.
• Only when I click on a name does a wider column get populated showing the titles of the PMs this person sent me.
• Bright blue for unread PMs, dark blue for read PMs.
• Clicking a title opens the PM screen wide as it does now.
• Needs a back button, and/or home button to be able to get back to the previous index, or main index.
• Have an outbox (https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/234) where copies of the PMs we sent are being kept.
• Outbox messages cannot be deleted by the user, the PMs in here delete themselves after a specific time (say 30 days), this so there is an easier paper trail in case an admin does need to check if a user is abusing the PM system.

We can leave the ignore function enabled here.

• Ignore function may require increased size, especially now with larger user IDs.

Additionally, show by colouring the user's name red that they have us on filter, so we don't have to find that out when we try to send them something. Show the user's name in a different colour to show we have them on filter.

[Ageless93]

With regards to the outbox, I got the code from Primegrid's Michael Goetz who have this in their forums. I'll add them to this thread: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k2orjgwxq5voin3/forum_pm.php?dl=0 (although the code here may not have changed, Michael didn't know for sure) https://www.dropbox.com/s/j8yv1ayly1gll1e/pm.inc?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/2nmd536jvwx3xhg/pm.php?dl=0

Michael Goetz writes:

It's one very small schema change (one column added to private_messages), and a very small number of PHP files that change. It definitely should be added to BOINC. It's a really nice improvement. All it does it set two bits in the private_messages table. One bit is set when the sender deletes the message, and the other when the recipient deletes the message. The PM isn't physically deleted until both parties delete it. It doesn't store separate copies of the PMs, so the overhead is only one byte per PM.

... Looking at the code, it looks like only html/user/pm.php and html/inc/pm.inc are affected.

Besides those two files, you may need to also modify the main private user account page as well as the forum page to call the pm_header function that displays "Inbox | Outbox | Inbox & Outbox | Write ". I don't remember if I put that in, or if it was already there beforehand. The two files that should call pm_header are html/user/forum_pm.php (three places) and html/user/pm.php (two places). If you include those, it's a total of 4 files.

He also gave me the schema needed for the database:

CREATE TABLE `private_messages` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `userid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `senderid` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `date` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `opened` tinyint(1) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `deleted_bits` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0' COMMENT '1=Deleted by recipient, 2=Deleted by sender',
  `subject` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `content` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `userid` (`userid`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=63862 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

[sirzooro]

+1 for adding Outbox. I wanted to return to one of emails sent to project admin, and could not do this. Fortunately in this case he replied to me with some part of my original message, so I found what I needed, but outbox would be more useful here.