Tamarians suggestion isn't too bad actually. It will still only be one version. It will just be up to the user how many of the optional code changes they wany to make to integrate it with vB. It will make the newnews.pl a bit more complicated due to the additional if/elses etc but it shouldn't be a big deal. I still intend to drop the 'import user' function.

Does that sound like a resonable solution?.

VERY much so!

Thanks :)

More than I ever hoped for :D

Theres only I few things that I would need in the next version before I can implement it on my board.

Fix the blank name on posts bug
Option to show date as when posted, rather than imported
A way to exclude usenet posts from the total post count. (and from pretty much everything else as well, but the post count is most important).

Cheers :cool:

Should be all done by tonight.

This is the first release of the new style usenet gateway that works without any code edits but allows you to optionally integrate it more tightly into vB by making code edits. You can make as many or as few code edits as you like. The script will still work.

This release details enough edits to bring back the functionality that was stripped out in the last release. More integration/options will be added as and when people request them. Two of my next features will be the ability to download from the binary groups and provide a link to the file from the description usually found in the '01' section of the usenet article and an option to recieve email from usenet via the PM system.

Here's what this one can do:

Without code changes:

• full control panel integration
• email notification to usenet replies
• emoticon translation into vb icons
• vb code removal or conversion prior to posting to usenet
• hyperlinked urls in messages & color coded and italicized posts
• vB style quote to usenet style quote conversions for outgoing posts
• logging of outgoing posts
• support for multiple news servers
• support for seperate footers per forum in outgoing posts
• multi-language (selectable) handling of quoted MIME printable headers (for all those funny foreign characters)
• flexible spam control and replacement variable options for both incoming and outgoing messages
• configurable auto-purge option
• global option for users to show their email address if user has selected that his/her email be displayed normally
• global option to enable/disable user signatures on outgoing posts.
• referencing usenet post count in templates (total posts will also include usenet posts)
• optional time source for usenet posts (time entered into forum vs time user posted to usenet)
• option to turn off indexing for usenet posts

With replacement variables and/or template changes:

• user selectable email address in their outgoing usenet posts (may be different than normal one in profile)
• suppression of unnecessary info in usenet posts, ie location, post count etc.
• configurable indented quotes in incoming usenet posts

With code changes:

• suppression of usenet post count from totals in templates
• auto refresh of global usenet variables to ensure post counts etc are always up to date
• optional suppression of usenet post count from totals in stats
• better ordering and sequencing of usenet posts when using the NNTP posting date as time source
• the 'last active' thread hack a la UBB.

Download the latest version

Once again it's late and I'm tired, so treat this release with care. Let me know of any bugs asap and I can release a true 'release version' to coincide with the vB final. You'll probably notice I've changed the version number to date. With the frequency of updates this makes more sense and is easier to track... maybe :)

I also intend to move this hack and all discussion over to vbdev.org at the next release.

The latest version of this hack will always be in this first post of the thread.

As always, you rock, fastforward :)

vbdev.org? Did you mean:

http://www.vbulletin.org

Search, and view new posts disabling? I personally hard code it, since I'm only interested in one usnet group.

I love it, and will install this weekend and report bugs (if any) :)

yeah... whatever :) I must have got confused with ubbdev :eek:
ooops. I forgot about that one. I'll add that tomorrow.

I can run newnews.pl and it appears to run through correctly. However after it does I get these errors on every page of my forums

When I load my forums home page it gives the above errors and only displays the categories and no forums. It also gives a database error when trying to run showthread.

However if I go to /admin/options.php and resubmit the options everything goes back to normal :confused:

What code changes did you make? Did you go through and re-check the tables to make sure all columns and indexes are as specified in the new versions. Alao, did you make sure you removed any existing code changes you may have made?

I implemented all the code changes you specified.

Yes, I deleted all my current usenet forums and removed the usenet_ tables. I then made sure the extra feilds matched up. Think it was only regpost I needed to add. I then created and populated the new usenet tables.

I implemented it from a clean copy of RC2 which I was previously running the last version of the hack on.

Hate to heap more problems on you but the NNTP posting time option doesn't seem to work, still uses local time.

Apart from that it works a treat :D

I'm working on it. I'll get back to you.

:rolleyes: If only there were no users. life would be so much easier for developers :D

I hear ya. :cool: Especially ones that don't know how to run a Java class (long story)

OK...

The parse errors may have been because it was the first time the script was run. The way it works now is it appends any usenet variables that need to be referenced by vB to the 'options' template. This means they can be accessible through layout templates without code changes. The variables causing problems are the post counts which were not quoted. If these are NULL, then it will generate a parse error as the resulting code would like this: ' $usenettotalthreads= ' instead of ' $usenettotalthreads="" '. That's easy to fix.

I can not reproduce your time problem. When I set NNTP in the options all my times show up correctly as the original posting date. Can you reconfirm that this is happening by comparing it against your newsreader? Or have you already done that?

This sounds about right, especially as everything was restored when I resubmitted the options. However I did run the script twice and the same problem happend both times.

Looking back on it, it's possible the option wasn't set on the second time I ran it. As half the posts seem to be okay. So ignore that part :)

A few bugfixes and the addition of the 'exclude usenet posts from new post search' option.

Take note of item number 4. If you have already installed the last version, you MUST change this column type to SIGNED for correct handling of outgoing posts.

1. Added option to exclude usenet posts from 'Get New Posts' search.
2. Fixed bug causing parse errors during first run.
3. Fixed bug causing newnews.pl errors 'e.field invalid column' error if custom profile field for outgoing email isn't added.
4. Fixed incorrect column type for isusenetpost in post and thread tables. They should be TINYINT(2) SIGNED.

This should be one step closer to a bugfree version. Time is running out, vB 2.0 will be out any day :)

I'll delay the move to vbulletin.org until the final release.

Download latest version

:( I'm still getting the same errors after a run that I detailed above :(

I've looked at the options template and after it has just run it has

$totalusenetposts=5902;
$totalusenetthreads=18;

After I go back and resumit the vB options page is changes to

$totalusenetposts="5902";
$totalusenetthreads="18";

i.e. it now has quotes

For temporary fix I've commented out generateoptions(); as I don't use total threads/posts anyway, and now all seems well.

(another edit). The NNTP post time seems to work for the first few posts then gives up and goes back to local time.

I think caching causes problems for this template update function aswell. I think the best solution will be if I remove it for the threadcounts and you will have to make a code edit to use them. It's only a one liner anyway.

I still can't reproduce your posting date problem. It's actually only 1 little line in the script that decides the date. When the script starts up, it reads all the config from the tables and then when it gets to the load forums bit it checks to see whether it should replace the nntp date with the local date. So the default is actually NNTP date. I'll keep trying to reproduce it though.

I've just looked at the code and the quotes are gone again! I think this because I started making the the edits on my test board while at work and then not transfer them to the distribution copy when I got home. All the other fixes I mentioned were still there, it's just the quuote issue around the post counts (which I'm removing anyway).

OK... sorry about all these posts. I have just found the problem with the date thing. The problem is obvious and I have no idea how I missed it! The conversion is only done when a thread starter is loaded. For replies I still had a hard code of '$dtm=time();' in there... ooops

Sorry about that.

Ah right :cool: good to hear it's not my misconfiguration again :).

Here's another one that attempts to fix the recent issues.

1. Eliminated parse errors by removing the function that appended to the vB templates. It was too unreliable and prone to error. In order to display the usenet counts on template pages you must now make a code edit. There is also a requirement to make one common code change if any of the optional code edits are made.
2. Fixed the NNTP/LOCAL time issues. (really this time... honest!)
3. There is also an addition to the code change instructions if you are using the lastactivethread hack.

Download v20010504 for RC2

I messed up again... I forgot to include the new usenet.php file in the package! I've edited the previous post and changed the version and download link. All should be OK now.

When I run newnews.pl I get this

I try running it again until it gets to that particular post and it fails again :( Previous to that though I had imported some posts and was working correctly.

What's the size and type of your ref column in the usenet_ref table. Try making it bigger.

It was varchar(128).

I've tried changing it to varchar(255) but get the same error.

If you need to test it the import was

It' the usenet date/time. It either doesn't exist (unlikely) or it's malformed in the usenet post header. This is one of the reasons I went to local time. Have a look at the article on the server and see what the date looks like. I can't see it as your article numbers mean nothing to my server. As a workround you can add the following code at line immediately above line 216 that reads: if ($dtm > time()+600) { $dtm = time(); }
That is an addition, NOT a replacement.

Note the little change I just made to that change. It should be !$dtm.

First of all, this is a wonderful hack!!

Now, on my web server I did not have Email::Find and MIME::WordDecoder and I installed both the modules. After that I am encountering the following error:

defined(@array) is deprecated at /usr/home/dsw/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/Net/DNS.pm line 137.
(Maybe you should just omit the defined()?)

Please help!!!

That error is actually being generated from the Net::DNS module. That module is not part of the hack. I believe the DNS module is patr of the libnet bundle. Try upgrading the libnet bundle using CPAN.

If that fails, you may want to try your suggestion. Find the line in DNS.pm that it talks about and change it there. Try just declaring it as @array; and see what happens.

In the meantime, I'll see if I can find any reference to this problem anywhere else.

That was just a warning! Since no processing was happening after that I thought it was an error. But then I found that I had both groups disabled. Now, I got everything working fine.

Thanks a bunch for the hack!!

Btw, I had to take a paid registration with usenet.com to get the newsfeed. Though I like the fact that it has a spamfree news server. Is there a free or cheaper newsfeed?

If you remove the -w switch from the shebang line in newnews.pl that warning will go away. At least you won't have to look at it each time :)
There are free ones around, but you have to look hard. They are usually unreliable, slow and carry a limited set of groups. You might be able to find decent $5.95 one for just the text groups but $10 seems the norm for a decent account.

I've made all the changed you specified and in addition I've switched the option to use local server time. However the same error still results :confused:

I removed the newgroup that was causing the trouble but it just happened on another group.

There's no need to set it to local time. The change just checked whether the $dtm field was populated with the nntp time and if it wasn't use the local time.

There is no doubt the error is being caused by the $dtm field not being populated. The reason this happens is because the time in the header is missing or malformed. The warning: 'Use of uninitialized value in numeric gt (> ) at newnews.pl line 216' is due to the $dtm field being null. (an advantage of 'use strict' and the -w flag) confirms this. Also you can see the dtm field is missing in the sql statement.

What news server are you using and what groups are giving the most problems. I'll try them and add some more error checking.

To confirm the problem, do this: Find line 299 that currently reads:
[code
($p,$e) = parse_from($f);
[/code]
Add the following line directly ABOVE it
So the resulting block of code around there will be:
Another quick fix is just remove the NOT NULL constraint from the usenet_ref table. This may have other unwanted side effects though :)

Hi....fastforward, Thanks for your hack...
But I have some questions, When I used spam control,it always appear a message as below:

Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/httpd/html/forum/admin/adminfunctions.php:18) in /home/httpd/html/forum/admin/usenet.php on line 231

how to slove this problems.please...

and in Options -> Character set for MIME decoder, it appear

Parse error: parse error, expecting `']'' in /home/httpd/html/forum/admin/usenet.php(55) : eval()'d code on line 2

Thanks for your help.... :) :) :)

I have already patch my newnews.pl with this method, But it still show the error message below:

Query failed:
INSERT LOW_PRIORITY IGNORE INTO usenet_article (newsgroup,forum,msgid,dtm,subject,poste
r,email,refs,body,msgnum,nntpposter,ord,threadid,p ostid) VALUES ('tw.bbs.comp.hardware'
,7,'<3f0Mhc$Zy5@bbs.cis.nctu.edu.tw>',982109749,'R e: ?бЦU?찪???㦳??window2000??????
?]?w???D????????','?A???N?Ъ??p?\\','wuuchung.bbs@bb s.cis.nctu.edu.tw',NULL,'==> ?b ens
.bbs@zoo.ee.ntu.edu.tw (?S?n?Z???F) ???峹??????:\n> ?N?O?ڭ̲oADSL\n> ?M???D???A??W
IN98?t??\n> ?ڬO??WIN2000?t??\n> ?Q??sygate?ӤW??\n> ???O?ڲ{?b?u???WB
BS\n> ?Ӥ????s?WWWW\n> ?аݭn?p???]?w?~???ѨM?H?H?H\n>
??ӷP?E????????\n\n ???ӬODNS?S???]?w?n.......\n--\n\n ?ڬO?ĤT?????N?ЧШk,?{?b?b?x?
_???s?????A???????N??,?????????????N??.\n\n ?Ѳ?.???f.?v??.?q???w??.?????Z?OCS?????D,?
ڳ?w???A?̨ӻP?ڤ@?_?Q??........\n--\n * Origin: ?? ???q?j?Ǹ??T???Ǩt BBS ?? <bbs.cis
.nctu.edu.tw: 140.113.23.3',245055,'wuuchung.bbs@bbs.cis.nctu.ed u.tw (?A???N?Ъ??p?\\)'
,-1+1,0,0)

DBD::mysql::db do failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'wuuchung.bbs@bbs.c
is.nctu.edu.tw',NULL,'==> ?b ens.bbs@zoo.ee.ntu.edu.tw (?S?n?Z' at line 1 at ./newnews.
pl line 579.

bash$

That warning will always be there until I get around to rewriting the control panel page. It's on the bottom of my to do list. It doesn't affect the functionality in any way.
I have no idea. I can't reproduce this. Did you change the character set from the default? I'll look into it.