Usenet gateway

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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

[Mark Hewitt]

Can't say if it happens all the time as I have only sent one post to usenet

I take it from this that it doesn't support multiple quotes within a single post?

[annams]

Not only for quote, it happens for URL too.

In case of URL it appears as [ url. The url and the closing [ /url ] are missing.

[fastforward]

It seems it depends on exactly what order the vb code appears in the message. It's not very easy to catch them all. Just taking the URL code as an example, I have to check for [ URL ], [ URL =.... ], [ URL ="..... ] etc. And then there is the problem of posts that embed the url by doing a please click HERE type thing. I either replace the HERE with the underlying url which may make the sentence to appear nonsense, or I could simply strip out the URL which is probably even worse. Then there's quotes and embedded quotes, colors with the # colors without the # but with double quotes.... I could go on, but you get the picture. And if that weren't enough, you have custom bbcodes

Anyway, I'll re-visit the regexes that trap these and see what I can do. The safest solution, however, is to turn vbcode off for usenet forums.

[annams]

I actually tried turning off vB code for the forum, then it had USENET articles displayed as [ URL ] url goes here [ /URL ].

So I quickly turned it back on. Thanks for looking into it.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by annams
I actually tried turning off vB code for the forum, then it had USENET articles displayed as [ URL ] url goes here [ /URL ].

So I quickly turned it back on. Thanks for looking into it.

Yes, you'd need to change the options in the usenet control panel to stop urls and smilies being converted. Unfortunately, that won't fix historical posts as the bbcode is added before the post is inserted into the forum.

Not to worry, I'll at least sort out the URL, QUOTE and standard bbcode problems in the next release. Simple custom bbcodes with no parameters are easy to trap for aswell. It's just the custom codes with multiple params that will be virtually impossible to fix.

[annams]

Could you please tell me when I can expect the next release? Thanks.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by annams
Could you please tell me when I can expect the next release? Thanks.

Sunday probably. I have a fulltime time job and a family. This is already taking way too much of my time

Once all these little niggly bugs are fixed I'm going to slow down for a bit. I've also got to spend some time re-doing my sites when vb 2.0 is released.

But don't worry, I've still got plenty of features planned for this hack like support for binary groups and email to PM gateway so I'm not going to give up on it. Besides, I need it for my own sites.

[Mark Hewitt]

It's working great at the moment but I'll tell you how I would like to see it work, for you to consider in later versions.

The thing which concerns me at the moment is the way that the posts are appearing on usenet, namely the fact that they only appear in reply to the first post, this being a restriction of having a linear board.

However how I'd like it to work is to create a seperate template set for use in the newsgroup forums, in this the "Post Reply" button will be completely removed.

Instead underneath each individual post I would put a link "Reply to this post", as far as the forum goes this would do exactly the same thing as Quote does (thus forcing people to quote the text). However when the posts are sent out to usenet the posts appear threaded in the correct way with the posts appearing in their correct positions in the threads.

[fastforward]

I think I can do this relatively easily. It would mean a vB code edit in newreply.php and, as you mentioned, a complete new template set. Although it will still work without templates and would depend on whether you clicked the 'Reply' or the 'Quote' button.

I agree that it would be better this way. In fact I seriously considered switching to wwwThreads and write the hack for that board instead. It allows each site visitor to switch between in-line and threaded view. That way you could see the usenet posts in a threaded format too. The thing that stopped me was the lack flexible custom templates via templates.

Anyway, I'll see if I can get it working this weekend. I'll make it a global control panel option.

[annams]

Hi,

On the web server I use there are limits on the resource usage. Because of these my cron job that runs newnews.pl is getting killed quite often. My questions are:

1. When the job gets killed in the middle, would that leave either the newsgroups data or the forums data in any inconsistent state?

2. Can you modify the script to rotate through the newsgroups, so whatever newsgroup that is currently being fetched first would be fetched last in the next run. Or better yet give the option to do few newsgroups everytime.

On my web server the following are the resouce limits:

Size of Core Files - 0 MB
CPU Time Used - 30 seconds
Data Size - 3 MB
File Size Created - 1 MB
Memory Locked - 1 MB
Number of Open Files - 32
Number of Simultaneous Processes - 8

I appreciate your help (and the hack :-) )