You can do it from the control panel in the 'Groups Section'

There is an option at the very top to purge all posts, or you can do it for each group.

But if you want to do it by hand you are correct in what you said. 'where isusenetpost=1'

Oops, that didn't work right. It just deleted the posts from the usenet forum, not from the screwed up one! I'll table by table.

Ah.. yeah.. sorry. I should have realized that. It's another safety feature to only delete from forums that are specified in the usenet_group table. As you've deleted it from that table it ignores it.

Fastforward, I think I found the explanation to what happened. I grep'd on test and found this:

vB_sql_changes.sql:INSERT INTO usenet_group (newsgroup, forum, lastmsg, server,
username, password, enabled, footer) VALUES ( 'alt.test', '2', '0', '', '', '',
'1', '');

I'm not sure if this was 2.1 or 2.3, but one of them probably wasn't 9999. Just in case anyone has the same installation.

Those funny threads were probably sucked in before I deleted alt.test.

Everything's fine now, and I'll install the 2.4

The link for downloading 2.4 doesn't work?

Doesn't work for me, but it did earlier. Here's a link that works: http://britishexpats.com/download/us...4__20b3.tar.gz

Well, I don't kow what to say, except I'm very sorry. I'm guessing I overwrote my original statement that had 9999 when I gave the docs an overhaul. To ensure everything worked I extracted the DDL & DML from my setup using phpMyAdmin. My setup was just for test and I did have the alt.test group pointing to forum #2.

I have now removed the alt.test group completely. I'll also add a note in the docs to double check the groups options page and make sure the forums specified are really where you want the usenet messages to go before runing the script for the first time.

The download link was a good one, but I woke up this morning to find my disk was full. Apparently I no longer have access to /dev/null so all my log files filled up. I guess I'll be on the phone all day to Host Pro :rolleyes:

Has anybody installed 2.4 yet? Is it all working OK?

No problem Fastforward, was just a minor inconvenience, nothing compared to the work you've done on this hack, which is the best vb hack in my book:)

With 2.4 i'm actually getting
Parse error: parse error in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/forum/admin/functions.php on line 871

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: vbdate() in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/forum/admin/sessions.php on line 326

in both admin/ and forum

It's the
$DB_site->query("UPDATE forum SET lastactivethread = LEFT('"..addslashes(htmlspecialchars($threadinfo[title]))."',$lastactivethread_length) WHERE forumid = ".$threadinfo[forumid]);
line...

I wrote a script that let's you insert an archived newsgroup or mailing list into the usenet tables. I wrote it so that I could import all the messages since the newsgroup was created and so that I could feed the new messages in from two sources, the mailing list and the newsgroup. Feeding it in from the two sources, I hope will eliminate my missing posts problem for the ones that don't make it into the newsgroup.

This script will read mail in from a file or from an email alias and then parses it to be included in the database. Then the messages will be inserted with the newnews.pl script provided in the Usenet Gateway hack. This script does not make use of any of the spam/binary filtering or other replacement strings that occur before it's inserted.

How to use this script:

From the command line, execute the script like:
That will insert all the messages in the text file into the database. The text file needs to conform to the mail standards, so it's the same format as the sendmail spool files and the same as what many other email programs use. (Basicly, the beginning of a message is signified by a line beginning with "From " followed by the headers, then an empty line, and then the body).

This script can also be used to insert a message sent to an email address right into the database. To do this, you'll need to create an alias in the sendmail aliases (usually at /etc/aliases) to execute the script. The alias would look like this:
Most systems are set up so that not just any script can be executed by sendmail for security reasons. Usually, you'll need to create a symbolic link to the file in a special directory (as root). In the systems I've used, this directory has been "/etc/smrsh/" or "/usr/adm/sm.bin/".

You'll need to rename the file to have the .pl extension.