I’m building a community news blog with multiple linked blogs using established, uniform categories all publishing to a unified front page. Now I’m looking into subscription management and broadcast service plugins.

MT Notifier is a good plug-in that meets some, but not all of my needs in this area. Wondering if anyone has found/developed hacks/plug-ins that tackle these 3 issues:

1) SPAM - Notifier users get “spammed” if they sign up to get e-mail alerts for more than one category. For example, if I build an interface where a user can say they want to be alerted to stories about “kittens”, “muffins”, “rainbows” and/or “Gaza”, and then I publish a blog that is about all 4 of these categories, the user will get 4 separate e-mails about the one blog. Not okay. Anyone have an easy way to circumvent this problem?

2) GROUPS - If some of my community bloggers already have a list of regular subscribers who currently get e-mail alerts about certain categories (let’s say Bill writes about health concerns, and he has 50 doctors who get alerts when he publishes a “health” related blog), how can I import and manage their existing subscriber lists into our community blog? Ideally, I want to have a spreadsheet list and just pop it into a database that can be added to or edited centrally as needed, going forward. I’d also like sending out an alert to be optional based on how relevant the news is to the defined groups. I should be able to control the lists centrally, but my bloggers should be free to set up their own email lists. Desperately seeking a group management plugin!

In my dream world, when a contributor publishes an entry, this is what happens… * The plugin fires up! Clicking “Send Email Alert” opens up a lightbox dialog. In the box there are two areas, one with centrally managed (me) groups and one with locally managed (blogger) groups.
* A contributor should be able to pick one or more email groups from both areas (click or ctrl+click) and then hit Send Alert (or Cancel). * Once they do this, a confirmation box asks if they’re absolutely sure they want to send out email alerts. * If a contributor wants to create a new email list or edit an existing list, they should be able to click a button to open another dialog box where they can enter/edit the title of an email group, and add/edit/delete email addresses. Batch uploads should also be available using an Excel spreadsheet (i.e. 1 column of email addresses) * Magical unicorns frolic on the screen.

3) BILINGUAL - I’m Canadian, eh? So I’m thinking of doing my community blog in both official languages, English & French. I see that Notifier has a nicely pre-made “fr.pm” file in /lib/MT/L10N/fr.pm, but I’m wondering if anyone has successfully tried to run both English and French email alert templates and subscription management screens from just one installation of Movable Type (running two separate blogs “en” and “fr” with multiple contributors), rather than two separate installations with two config files using two separate default languages? Available hack, anyone?

Also concerned about possible security risks with subscription management screens coming from the app tier. What if I put my app tier behind a firewall? What are the security issues around email-based subscribing/unsubscribing, if any?

Thanks for any help or advice! Moira