Simple mailing list export script for VBulletin

The London MMUG web site currently runs on VBulletin and I've been finding the built-in mailing list feature in VB to be less-than-satisfactory. When you have members in the thousands, it just isn't usable. So, for the past two months or so, I've been using Auto Mailer to send out the monthly MMUG newsletters but this has been a royal pain in the butt as it involved selecting the users from the VB database and then massaging it to the tab-delimited form Auto Mailer requires. Not rocket science but tedious. So, tonight, I decided to save myself the trouble and write a few lines of PHP to do it for me and I'm releasing the simple little script here in case it helps anyone else.

What does it do?

The script creates a simple tab-delimited .txt file with the username and email address of users that have agreed to accept emails on your VBulletin Forum. That's it, really!

Usage instructions:

  1. Copy the script to the box that has your VB installation (ideally, make a copy of the VB database and run this script on a non-deployment machine.) Do not leave this script in an insecure folder in a live VB installation or anyone who runs it can get a nice list of all your users.
  2. Add your database connection details to the script.
  3. Create a folder called output in the same folder as the script and make sure that it has global write privileges.
  4. Run the script and right click the link to the resulting text file and save it.
I'm releasing it under CC-GNU GPL.

Download vb_mailing_list.zip (7kb)

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