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

Replace that line with the following:

$DB_site->query("UPDATE forum SET lastactivethread = LEFT('".addslashes(htmlspecialchars($threadinfo[title]))."',$lastactivethread_length) WHERE forumid = ".$threadinfo[forumid]);

It's the extra dot in front of the addslashes that's causing the problem.

Sorry about that. I've updated the docs.

It won't affect anyone who did an upgrade. The error wasn't there in the previous versions. Only those who have done a fresh install of 2.4 will see this error.

Archive/email to Forum!
I wrote a script that let's you insert an archived newsgroup or mailing list into the usenet tables. I wrote it so that I could import all the messages since the newsgroup was created and so that I could feed the new messages in from two sources, the mailing list and the newsgroup. Feeding it in from the two sources, I hope will eliminate my missing posts problem for the ones that don't make it into the newsgroup.

Thanks for this Gilby. I can actually make use of this myself. I wanted to include the php.net mailing list archive into my forums. It doesn't comply with the usual usenet style mail archives so this is ideal!

In my outgoing usenet messages I use the email address at forums@britishexpats.com. This means I get a whole bunch of replies to forum users that have posted questions sent to my default email. The header actually looks like this:

fastforward <forums@britishexpats.com>

So the user is easily identifiable. Does anyone think it's worth adding something that will collect all these messages, run them through the spam filter and forward them on to the member? Or is it likely to cause members to become irate if a bit of spam leaks through?

how about forwarding them to the user's pm box with the following bit added at the top:

"This was sent to you as a reply to a newsgroup post.. we can not accepted responsibility etc..."

Chris... I thought you were dead! Where have you been? On holiday?

I never thought of using the PM box. thats not a bad idea.

Originally posted by fastforward
Does anyone think it's worth adding something that will collect all these messages, run them through the spam filter and forward them on to the member? Or is it likely to cause members to become irate if a bit of spam leaks through?

I have the email address set up to be an autoresponder to let the person know that that message was not received. Since the newsgroup that I am doing it on is also an email list, a lot of people just hit the reply all button to respond, so those really don't need to be passed on to the person it's being responded to. The autoresponder also puts in a little plug for my site and tells them to go to the site to send a PM.

Anyways, I think the best option (probably more complicated to do too ) would be to have an option in the profile on whether they want to have the email sent to them to be forwarded to an address they specify, put in their PMs, or neither.

Originally posted by fastforward

Thanks for this Gilby. I can actually make use of this myself. I wanted to include the php.net mailing list archive into my forums. It doesn't comply with the usual usenet style mail archives so this is ideal!

I'm glad it's useful for you! If you want to add it to the distribution of the usenet hack (and possibly modify it further), feel free to do so.

I'm kind of curious....what kind of a load does this impose on a server?

It really depends on how many groups you are pulling and how busy they are. On one site I have about 12 groups. When that script runs you don't even notice it. It may as well not be there. On my other site I am pulling in 70 groups. With this one the load gets to 1.0 - 1.5 as it gets near the end of the run. Most of the work is spent building that damn searchindex table! I wish it just go away! Without indexing the posts the load would not be worth talking about.

I created this Manual Insertion hack that integrates into the vB admin control panel. This hack will let you select messages that are in the que to be inserted but don't have references matching any of the existing messages and are therefore stuck in the usenet_article table. Once selecting the messages, you can do the following:

• Delete
• Start a new thread
• Merge selected messages together into one thread
• Insert post(s) into existing thread

All actions, except delete, take effect once the newnews.pl script is executed.

The installation is pretty simple, there is one SQL query that needs to be run and then two additions to to the usenet.php file. If you have any questions or find a bug, please feel free to ask.

fastforward, feel free to include this in the Usenet Gateway hack distribution or do anything else you want to with it.