When articles are pulled down from usenet, their order within the thread is calculated and the article is placed in usenet_article. This table is just a temp holding area. At the same time the usenet_ref table is populated with the mesage ids of the articles it refers to.

The next step is to load any messages from the usenet_article table that has no refs (ie. an initial thread starter) into the thread and post tables. Then it deletes the article from the usenet_article and usenet_ref table.

Next it goes through the usenet_article table in conjuntion with the usenet_ref table and loads any messages that refer to an article already in the post table. It will only place it in to the post table if it is in order. For example, if post 1 and 2 are already in the post table and 4,5 and 6 are in the usenet_article table, the articles will NOT get loaded because article 3 is still not available. If you look at the 'ord' column, only posts at the same level or one higher will get loaded. Then it deletes the article from usenet_article and usenet_ref.

As an example for numbers you might expect; I mirror 6 newsgroups and have 2069 in thread, 4463 in post, 1288 messages still in usenet_article and 4463 in usenet_ref. My $expire is set to 14 days. This means any messages left in usenet_article that are over 14 days old will be deleted. Remember, the reason they are still in usenet_article is because the article they refer to is not available on the server or was rejected for spam or something.

The messages not showing up as new, happens due to the nature of usenet and the way messages are propogated. The modification made to showthread.php uses the 'ord' column to sort by first, then the dateline. This means makes the messages appear in the correct order. However, vBulletin uses date to determine whether the message is new. This means not all messages will show up new when they should. You will also run into problems with users not setting their clock correctly. Although the script handles time zones correctly, I often see articles with a future date because the users pc clock is wrong.

The first version I made of this script created a dummy date based on the order of the article. So each time a post was received the time was set to a few minutes after the article it refered to. This avoided the problem but meant you had no way of knowing when the post was really made. Maybe I should go back to this method. What do you think?

Addendum:
Since posting this, I just took another look at showthread.php. I believe it will be quite easy to fix the new post icon issue. I will have to create an additional dummy date field based on the actual date the article is placed into your forums. The real date will remain where it is now. I will modify showthread.php to use the dummy date field when doing anything with usenet forums but use the normal field for other forums. This will also eliminate the need for the original modification in that file. I'll try to make the fix this evening.

regards

[Edited by fastforward on 01-23-2001 at 10:48 AM]