Well, my bright idea turned dim. I know I'm right track, but my Perl skills are just not up to this task. At least not without a hundred or so hours of head scratching and testing.

I thought it would be as easy as changing the decode to encode in this line:
decode_entities($f); decode_entities($s);

but for some reason it loops or repeats a bunch of times. You can see the output here:
http://www.mis-forums.com/vbbs/showt...threadid=17939

Then I started to look at newnews closer and realized that not only do incoming subject titles and poster names need to be encoded but they will need to be decoded before sending them back to USENET (I think).

Unfortunately, as we talked about earlier this is a problem of the way vB stores user names and thread/post titles/subjects. If vB stored the raw data (&,",<,>) and filtered it before displaying it like they do in all other data fields there would not be a problem.

This would go unnoticed for a long time because IE5 seems to digest the bad characters without problems, however, it is way bad HTML style to have &'s and greater/less than symbols where they don't belong, and the pages will never come close to validating.

Damn, I'm the bearer of bad news again! :(
I wish I could help more.

Paul I tried to copy and paste from shell but having problem with that. I have attached a zip file on what error I get. I download articles and it states they are downloading and then I get the attached error when it completes. The messages show up in my phpmyadmin but not on my board. It does however add a topic on my board with this title: Using an online form to enter data in to a local database. and also this one Tables set to 100% width
but only a title nothing in threads when you click on them. I get the samw thing every time I run script. my site is at http://forums.realwebhost.net look at frontpage on bottom.

The zip file should show you the error hopefully.

Hope you have time to look at it. This is what my host thinks the probelm is. I don't know need help please.

it's causing an SQL error. I think it's probably due to some
> characters not being escaped correctly. Tell the developer to try
> and auto escape all the characters contained in the pagetext prior
> to it attempting an insert.

Hope you understand that. Joey

All characters are already escaped before inserting into the database. If they weren't, nothing would work for anybody :)

If you look at your error message, you will see the threadid is null. This is what's causing it to fail.

You need to make sure you have the latest DBI/DBD modules from CPAN. Older versions do not support the msql_insertid function correctly.

Does this correct for a cron job for the script to run it very 20 minutes?

*/20 * * * * /home/realweb/newnews.pl

joey

This one fires every 20 minutes
0,20,40 * * * * /your/pathto/newnews.pl >/your/pathto/cron_usenet.log

This one does its work twice an hour
0,30 * * * * /your/pathto/newnews.pl >/your/pathto/cron_usenet.log

Do you see the idea here?
If you want it to run at 12 mins past the hour and then at 43, 47, and 52 minutes past the hour it would be
12,43,47,52 * * * * /your/pathto...

This part of the line
>/your/pathto/cron_usenet.log
saves the output to the the file cron_usenet.log
You can then download cron_usenet.log and see if everything worked properly. Name the file anything you want, just make sure the path is correct for your server.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for ther help guys. PAUL I have live data now in the forum, updated the module as you requested. It works?

Great HACK.

Thanks Crawler for the cron data.

Paul what server do you pull the php and mysql on your site from?

Joey

You're welcome Joey, I'm happy you got it working. Now fasten your seatbelt for the disk space ride. You're gonna need a *lot*.

The fun has just begun! :D

thanks

fastened

Not sure I understand the question. Do you mean where do I download MySQL & PHP from or are you asking what or where is the server that houses my site?

where you download php, perl, mysql newsgroups from?

Joey