It should be fairly straight forward to write a job that runs (daily?) to loop through all members and add them to groups for their instruments, creating groups as necessary.

The catch will be where instruments are listed slightly differently, but you really want them in the same group. Perhaps spelling mistakes, or perhaps minor variations that the musicians like to make but are not big enough to warrant a separate group. I am not a musician, but suppose you wanted a group for 'Guitar', and the musicians entered 'Spanish Guitar', 'Electric Guitar', 'Base Guitar' etc...

JTF,

Thanks for your response. The spelling idea occurred to me that's why the members have to go through the huge list of instruments when they register. If you have a quick look at the link you'll see the list. These attributes are already applied to the users.

That's exactly what I was thinking, running a job to add the users to the group. I could just run it manually when I wanted to send an email to Members who own a particular instrument. Right now, I have to email all of them.

Email me if you would be interested in writing it for me John. Thank you

Looking at the link, I see what you mean. Massive option list.

If the only reason for groups is to send an occasional email to the group, and that is a direct email rather than through the site, then all you really need is a dashboard page or a block that shows the same checkbox list and spits out a list of email addresses depending on what is selected. You can then copy and paste the email list into your mailer.

Such a list generator could also be set up on a page using a combination of Magic Data and Blocks by Ajax.

As with many things, the solution could be very minimal as above or grow in sophistication depending on how big a budget it is worth.

JTF,

Yes massive :D Thank goodness Technics don't make keyboards any more, so it can't grow.

I send my mails using the Mailing List addon, which can send to specific user groups.

Your suggestion is a good one but if I can put the members into groups it means that I will be able to email them using the Mailing List addon AND do more with that information. For example, I could make certain pages visible or not to a certain group. I can't think why I would do that right now but it is an example.

Perhaps a better example would be: if they own a particular instrument I could make the user manual for that instrument available in their profile. Yep, I like that idea a lot!

Come to think of it, I like your idea too. Best of both worlds.

I'm going to email you later this afternoon regarding our email discussion last year.

In that case, a job that puts users into groups based on the attributes makes more sense. It wouldn't be any more difficult. The only reason I suggested simply outputting emails was it avoids cluttering up the list of groups.

Another approach could be to extend the mailing list addon to filter users based on attributes as well as from groups. I don't know how hard that would be as I have never looked inside it.