By kirkcaraway on

I love the power and simplicity of tools like Twitter and Posterous that allow people to easily post content from email and mobile phones.

What I would like to do is to capture some of this power for a local news website I am building in Drupal.

Specifically, I would like to enable anyone to send text or photos via SMS or email to the site and have it post to a Community Pulse page.

Allowing anonymous users to post this way would be very powerful, and it would seem very simple to modify existing modules to enable this function.

The hard part would be to keep this from becoming the mother-of-all spam magnets.

There seems to be a few ways to limit the problems. One way would be to send all first-time messages into a moderation queue. Once a message is found to be legitimate, then all messages from that address/number would be OK'd to post without moderation. Senders who aren't legitimate can be marked as spammers, and their messages automatically discarded so they don't clog up the moderation queue.

I'm not a coder, and setting this up is a bit beyond my abilities. But I'd be willing to chip in some bounty money to see it built.

Is there anyone else out there interested in this kind of functionality?

Comments

pharma’s picture

pharma commented

This is coll feature .I am not a programmer either. But seems like this might help

http://drupal.org/project/mail2web

kirkcaraway’s picture

kirkcaraway commented

That is heading in the right direction, but no there yet.

dcc1’s picture

dcc1 commented

Cool thought.

Keep us posted if anyone comes up with this.

kirkcaraway’s picture

kirkcaraway commented

I wonder if the Mobile Media Blog module could be reverse engineered to serve this purpose:

http://drupal.org/project/mmb

What could be done is to create only one mmb for the one user, then take out the restrictions that only allow certain email/numbers to post. But maybe we could take that part and reverse it, so that everyone posts, but first-time posts are held in moderation until approved, and once approved, that number/email is added to the accepted lists.

drupalina’s picture

drupalina commented

Subscribing.

I think creating a web-based Twitter-like site should be easy. But the key to Twitter's success is the fact that people can post Twits (now with pictures, @replies and, importantly (!), #hashtags) via SMS is the key to its success.

Without a viable "post-via-SMS" solution, a Twitter clone would be pretty useless.

Project http://drupal.org/project/mmb is still in 5x-dev and has not been developed for 3 years. So something a lot more solid is needed.

toitimhcm’s picture

toitimhcm commented

infact that, both modules should be worked in hard befor can use with your site

Aeonius’s picture

Aeonius commented

subscribing