[fastforward]

Originally posted by James Cridland
cpan> install MIME::WordDecoder
?
cpan> install HTML::Entities
?
cpan> install Mail::Address
?

...and as you can see, I'm stuck with the last three. I'm still persevering, and I hope this is useful to some who are trying to install it on my kind of setup (ActivePerl, Apache, Win2000).

Activestate provide ports for all of these
WordDecoder is part of the MIME-Tools package.
HTML::Entities is part of the HTML-Parser package
Mail::Address is part of the MailTools package

I recently changed some of the modules that were being used to ensure that there were ActiveState modules available.

On win32 systems, you will have to comment out the bit that checks for a previous running version near the top of newnews.pl.

It would make more sense, to this user at least, to have a fully native PHP solution rather than having to use Perl: since, as I understand it, all the necessary code's already in PHP.

There are no native NNTP functions built into php. There is IMAP support (assuming you compiled it with the appropriate options), but that doesn't provide you with full newsreader capabilities. That aside, the reading of the news is actually the easy bit. The main guts of the script deals with news synchonisation & parsing and database access and vB integration. There is no doubt you could write it in PHP, but you wouldn't have the Perl modules to help you. You would also have to install the binary version of php to allow periodic execution of the script.