Usenet gateway

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This hack has undergone many major changes since this thread was started. Consequently, most of the posts have become dated and of little use. To coincide with the latest major release (20010712), a new one has been started.

See this thread for the latest version and discussion

thanks for this, i am so happy now

i am going to install and play and see if i can suggest etc things for it but probably wait to open it up to my members until the v2.0 version comes out.

Have to say this is one of the best features out there for vbulletin and bar co-branding and unlimited depth forums beats most of the additions for v2, thanks so much for making it

ok problem...

i installed some of the modules using cpan which was ok but one of them some how decided that it wanted to re-install the whole of perl without even asking. This, scared me quite a lot and i quit it which may not have been the best thing to do i don't know.

Anyway, after that little episode i think i did everything but i get this error message:

Net::NNTP: Bad hostname 'spamkiller.newsfeeds.com
' at newnews.pl line 219
Unable to connect to spamkiller.newsfeeds.com

now is this a problem with Net::NNTP (not being installed?) or the hostname (which is correct, it works in outlook express anyway). Any suggestions?

thanks..

spamkiller.newsfeeds.com is now known as spamkiller.usenet.com. They changed it around a month ago.

The Net::NNTP is part of libnet which may well have been already installed. If you're getting an error saying it can't fnd the host, it probably means the module is OK. It wouldn't have got that far otherwise.

newsfeeds.com appears to have come back, it is working. it was a silly mistake i think the server name went on to to line in the perl script and it didn't like it...

any way, currently going through the downloads so have it working... why did you have to release it now.. it is 4.30a.m here and i can't stop (i am only kidding just so pleased to play with this!)

one question, the "rejected bad header" what is that for? i get quite a few of these, probably 20% of them so far, is it spam or is it something else they are rejected for?

The bad header is usually due to strange character sets or a bad news client being used to post the article. Usually you'll see this in test and binary groups where people may be testing out there own posting programs. 20% seems high. I was getting that sort of number when I was using alt.test. But a real newsgroup only rejects a tiny percentage.

The script actually puts out the rejected header message when it can't find a message id in the header. This is usually due to the reasons above.

ok few things:

1) get these errors once it has finished going through the articles:

Use of uninitialized value at newnews.pl line 150.
Use of uninitialized value at newnews.pl line 150.
Use of uninitialized value at newnews.pl line 150.
Use of uninitialized value at newnews.pl line 150.
Use of uninitialized value at newnews.pl line 174.

2) Posting hangs

It appears the script hangs when trying to send posts back to the newsgroups. tried twice and nothing has happened for over 10 minutes now.

3) Numbers..

is this odd:

Processing group alt.tv.stargate-sg1...2321 messages.

results:

usenet_ref : 6098
usenet_article : 1028
thread : 204
post : 774

seems a bit weird to me

i am going to try a few more newsgroups but any ideas on why posting ain't working?

The uninitialized value messages are because the script is running using STRICT and with the -W switch. It's from all the regular expression testing in the article parsing bit. It basically means its trying to test an empty variable. It can be ignored and if you take of the -w switch it will disappear.

The numbers you show seem ok. The 2321 are the numbers the server reports it has. This is usually slightly high by maybe 25 to 100 messages. The usenet_ref table is the many to many link between articles and replies. Because you are doing the initial history pull you will find a lot of messages left in the usenet_article table because it contains replies to threads that have since expired from the server. Once history is collected you can set the $expire variable to a sensible value and it will gradually reduce as time goes on.

As for the posting problem, it works for me in alt.test. I'll keep looking looking and let you know if I find any problems. What message are you seeing before it hangs? Do you see the "Posting message by $poster to $newsgroup..." message?

The posting problem is an SQL statement problem. I removed some unwanted fields from the usenet_outgoing table but didn't change the statement. Unfortunately I was using select * instead of listing the fields.

In the post_outgoing routine (the last function in the script) change line 281 that reads my '$q2 = db_fetch(...'
to read:
my $q2 = db_fetch("SELECT poster,newsgroup,subject,refs,body FROM usenet_outgoing");
And change the line below it to:
while ( my ($poster,$newsgroup,$subject,$refs,$body) = $q2->fetchrow_array ) {

Sorry about that. The fix is in the package for download.

There's always something I mess up!

ps. There's also another little change you can make to showthread.php that will ensure the posts are ordered correctly everytime. Not essential but I've put it in the package.

[Edited by fastforward on 01-22-2001 at 12:39 AM]

thank you, i noticed when i posted a post to a thread it actually appeared 2nd to last as opposed to last so if it sorts that out, brilliant.

thanks, will apply fixes later today and see how it goes