Usenet gateway

THIS THREAD IS CLOSED!
Posts in here will NOT be answered

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

OK... here ya go.

I've tested this on around 600-700 messages from alt.test using onlynews.com and also a DNEWS server.

You will get a lot of crap from alt.test though as everyone is testing similar stuff to this. There'll also be a lot of binary and mime stuff in there.

let me know how you get on.

Bingo, that did it! Back in business. Got right around the post that was causing the crash. I've setup cron to pull every 30 minutes, so I'll give it a couple of days to see if it trips up any more.

Thank you again so much. If I can send you a contribution for your troubles, drop me an email!

Three days now without an error!!!!! Very well done!!!

I think there may be a problem with the email notification of new replies, but I'm still looking into that.

Cheers!

I think the email reply routine makes use of the mysql_insert_id function that you were having problems with before. I'll have a look and confirm it. If that's the case, it makes sense that you're having problems and I'll come up with a solution for you.

I've also had a play with vB version 2 and as far as I can see there should be no problems making it work. The backend should work with little or no changes. Just the changes to the files that handle new posts and replies will need to be redone. But I'm waiting for the final release before I do anything.

regards

looking forward to it

Just for my own time table - what are the current plans on this for the 2.0 release?

I actually thought it was ready this weekend but I came across a problem when dealing with mailing list archives such as the mailing.database.mysql newsgroup. Because these are posted to via an email program rather than a news client, I need to add more functionality to check for parent posts without relying on the X-References header.

At worst it will be out by Sunday, but as long as I have no major set-backs it should be ready mid to late of this week.

You can see how it's coming along at dBforums.com. You may see it filling up and emptying of posts at random while I'm testing.

There will be no control panel access in this release. I'll try and finish that by the final vB 2.0 but I'm not promising.

Some of the extra stuff that will be in this version are:

• Handling of quoted MIME printable headers (for all those funny foreign characters)
• Correct handling for mailing archive groups
• Color coding and indenting of quotes (customizable via replacement vars)
• vB style quote to usenet style quote conversions
• Usenet posters can be auto-added as special vB users to allow searching and post count tracking (they can easily be converted to real users by changing usergroup).
• email notification to vB users of 'replied to' usenet posts (uses existing vB template)
• Multiple news server support
• plus some other guff that I can't remember.

Would this script be compatible with a mailing list instead of just newsgroups? I have a mailing list archive (1994 to present) I want to put into a forum and then have email to a certain address be piped into a php or perl script to be inserted into the forum. The latter isn't as important since the main mailing list that I want to do is also a newsgroup, but there are a couple other mailing lists I'd like to put into their own forum. Anyways, being able to read a standard mail archive file (like what the mail spool file is) and stuff it into a forum all threaded and such would be nice.

You couldn't use it as is, but it wouldn't be too hard to modify. The script has four main sections at the moment:

1. Retrieve articles from server
2. Parse headers, format and spam control
3. Thread and sort
4. Insert into forums

2,3 & 4 can be pretty much left alone (maybe some unneeded stuff can even be taken out). Number one just needs to be changed to get the messages from the mail spool. If you don't fancy doing it yourself I will take a look after I've released a stable(ish) version.

will post some "more" things are i think of them...

* for usenet posters, somehow the offline/online thing should not happen as it makes no sense. I guess this is an edit in showthread.php based on usergroup.

* questionable value of "report to moderator" in usenet groups. I am not sure if moderating a usenet group is really something feasible or practical so perhaps there is a way to turn these off. I assume their is a field in forum table that says isUsenet type thing, perhaps we can do an if/elseif on report to moderator based on this?

* A way to restrict searches from usenet and non usenet forums. I guess this is an extra function that would be needed inside search. I know it could be done by setting the forumids manually inside search.php but a better way would be to autogenerate this on the isUsenet type field.

all for now...