[fastforward]

Originally posted by dwh
I did a new install but had to manually delete a bunch of fields and now it's not quite working...on telnet I can run newnews.pl once it says "killed" and the second time it seems to work, though I haven't seen new messages posted.

Check the line that reads

my $ps_pid=`/bin/ps xaww | grep newnews.pl | grep -v "grep"`;

It's near the top of the script. Make sure the script name matches what you have there. Also make sure there is no newnews.pid (or whatever you have the variable set to) is lying around in the directory.

Maybe there was an issue w/ the way I upgraded but I worry that once it's production and my users get used to it, will I have to follow this thread every day to make sure I will be able to upgrade in the future? Will new releases of vb be as big a pain as this one was.

Probably. There is no way of knowing what changes Jelsoft will make in the code and/or table structure.

Having said that, it's unlikely that any major new functionality will be added to this hack for some time. And when it does, it will be infrequently. So any changes should only be nenews.pl, which is a drop in replacement. The only other changes should be new code changes which have to made with each vB version anyway. Table structure modifications will be few and far between and only when made when necessary.

If you miss a large number of hack updates, they are all archived in the download directory. I'll change the my server permissions to allow a directory listing of the files sometime over the weekend.

Actually, there's a new version coming out tomorrow or over the weekend that fixes outgoing mail notification and 'top posting' among other things. Don't worry though, it's only a newnews.pl drop-in replacement.