[RELEASE] Usenet Gateway for vB 2.01

Description:

This hack provides a gateway to selected usenet groups. The entire usenet group is mirrored locally. Posts submitted locally to mirrored newsgroups will also be sent out to usenet. A single perl script is executed via cron that collects news and posts any outgoing articles. Incoming messages are parsed against customizable spam filters and threaded correctly before being placed in your forums. By default, no personal information is sent to usenet other than the posters username and whatever you have globally configured as a footer and organization. The option does exist for a user to include a custom email to use for usenet posts. After initial installation (which involves creating some new tables, adding a few columns to existing vB tables, and entering the database connection information to the news script) configuration is completed via the vB control panel.

• See it in action at dBforums.com (usenet forums are at the bottom)
• Download latest version for vB 2.2.4

Current version is 20020323 for vB2.xx

Current feature list:

• correct threading of outgoing posts on usenet
• full control panel integration
• email notification to usenet replies
• emoticon translation into vb icons
• vb code removal or conversion prior to posting to usenet
• hyperlinked urls in messages
• color coded, italicized & indented quotes
• vB style quote to usenet style quote conversions for outgoing posts
• logging of outgoing posts
• support for multiple news servers
• support for seperate footers per forum in outgoing posts
• multi-language (selectable) handling of quoted MIME printable headers (for all those funny foreign characters)
• handling of mailing archive groups
• flexible spam control and replacement variable options for incoming and outgoing messages
• configurable auto-expire option
• option for users to show email address in their outgoing usenet posts (may be different than normal one in profile
• option to enable/disable user signatures on outgoing posts.
• fully compatible with vB moderation functions

Still to be done:

• canceling of messages after they have been sent to usenet via control message in accordance with RFC1036.
• binary attachment support
• email to PM gateway

Screeshots:
Main Options
More Options
Configuration of Newsgroups
Add New Newsgroups
Spam Control
What an imported usenet article looks like in vB

The latest version of this hack will always be in this first post of the thread.

Before asking questions in this thread, please read all the posts in this thread. If your question goes unanswered, it will probably be because the question has already been answered countless times in this thread.

This hack was created for use on my forums and will only be supported as time permits.


Links to required Perl Modules

• News::NNTPClient
• Net::SMTP
• MIME::WordDecoder
• Text::AutoFormat
• Mail::Address
• URI::Find
• DBI
• DBD::MySQL
• Date::Parse
• HTML::Entities

[fastforward]

Originally posted by Brian Cruz
I've also noticed that when outgoing posts which contain quotes appear on usenet, the quoted text has blank lines between them. They look like this:

Juan F. Lara wrote:
> Years ago I heard that Warner Brothers Television Animation was going to

> make an "Osmosis Jones" TV series to go along with the movie. Whatever

> happened to that TV series? Are they still going to make it?


Is that normal for the script or did I set up something wrong?

No, this is not normal. It looks like a nasty bug. Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?

I'll fix it this weekend. In the meantime, if you go to line number 1029 in newnews.pl and change the existing line that currently reads:

push(@article," > $q\n\n");

to

push(@article," > $q\n");

[Brian Cruz]

Originally posted by fastforward

No, this is not normal. It looks like a nasty bug. Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?

Thanks, I've made the change. Another thing I noticed is that when I quote a usenet post which contains a link, it appears in my new reply window as this (I added the spaces between the brackets so it shows up here):

[ q1 ]: [ url="http://130.94.172.139/forums/" ]http://130.94.172.139/forums/[ /url ][ /q1 ]

And on usenet it shows up like this:

> http://130.94.172.139/forums/http://130.94.172.139/forums/

Is that also a bug?

Originally posted by fastforward

Yeah, that should be easy. Usenet posts made by forum members can be identified by a '-1' in the isusenetpost column in the post table.

It might take me a few weeks to get around to it though. I'm in the middle of re-doing BritishExpats.com. It's still running vB 1.1.6 so I think it's about time I did something about it.

You can make the change yourself if you like. It's easy peasy. Find the line that was added by the usenet hack in search.php. It should read:
$wheresql.=" AND thread.isusenetpost=0";
Change that to:
$wheresql.=" AND thread.isusenetpost=0 AND post.isusenetpost <= -1";

If you just want threads that were started by members, change it to:
$wheresql.=" AND thread.isusenetpost <= -1";


bitbender:
Thanks for your kind words.

unfortunatly im getting this when doin those additions:

Database error in vBulletin: Invalid SQL: SELECT COUNT(*) AS threads FROM thread

WHERE thread.visible=1 AND 1=1 AND thread.lastpost>=998680523 AND thread.open<>10 AND thread.isusenetpost=0 AND post.isusenetpost <= -1
mysql error:
mysql error number:
Date: Friday 24th of August 2001 01:51:05 PM
Script: /~unreal-a/vbulletin/search.php3?s=&action=showresults&getnew=true&sear chid=551
Referer:

Any hints? Thanx in advance!

-Alex

[fastforward]

Originally posted by Pie'oh'pah



unfortunatly im getting this when doin those additions:

Database error in vBulletin: Invalid SQL: SELECT COUNT(*) AS threads FROM thread

WHERE thread.visible=1 AND 1=1 AND thread.lastpost>=998680523 AND thread.open<>10 AND thread.isusenetpost=0 AND post.isusenetpost <= -1
mysql error:
mysql error number:
Date: Friday 24th of August 2001 01:51:05 PM
Script: /~unreal-a/vbulletin/search.php3?s=&action=showresults&getnew=true&sear chid=551
Referer:

Any hints? Thanx in advance!

-Alex

Looks like it's not as easy as I thought. the post table is not in the from clause. You'll have to wait until I can think of another way.

Sure No Problem

just add this to your to do list, if you like

Thnx for fast response!

-Alex

[JCDR]

Originally posted by fastforward

It goes out the next time you run the script. How long it takes before it shows up on the news server is dependent on each server. Assuming the post was accepted, and you are reading from the same server to which you posted, it should be only a few minutes.

Sorry FF I didn't explain fully, the message was posted but the subject of the message was not so all that was posted to the newsgroup was a blank message but the subject was there.

[webhost]

Fastforward you might wnat to take a look at this thread then come back and read what happens when you do this. This will happen to all users with next version if not corrected.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...threadid=26126


I did what the above thread mentioned and it did work after I replaced script in functions.php. Then I updated counters in control panel the forums that were empty it cleared out the last username and date/time of the last post.
The problem came with the usenet groups even though they all had tons of post's in them the last post column on all of them also got cleared out. The other regular forums that did have post's in them did not. So if even though this does fix a bug with vb it screws with the usenet hack a little. I ran the pl file again and any newsgroups that had new posts they were installed in the last post column so this is just a small problem. Just wanted everyone that is using the usenet to know that until this is somehow fixed everytime you update counters if you make the change mentioned in the above thread that this will happen.

Joey

[DarkReaper]

A small bug:

In new reply, at the very top I get "8/10/08" before any of the header loads. I've figure out that when there's stuff way up there, its usually because a variable is being called that has no value. I find this strange though, as the only change I have made to newreply.php is the single code change for the usenet hack, and the template for it is still the same.

Any ideas?

Hi,

I have installed the hack on my server
v20010820 (for 2.03)

I think this is a great hack, but I'm having trouble

========================
When I run newnews.pl
- I succesfully connect to the news server
- I get a load of NNTPERROR: 430 No such Article
- Then says fetching xxxx... OK for a while
- NNTPERROR: 421 No next article
- NNTPERROR: 423 No such article in group
- NNTPERROR: 430 No such article a few times
- -> Processing article batch -> requested 56 messages 0 not available or rejected
- -> inserting new threads from alt.comp.periphs.cdr.mitsumi

Then
Query failed
INSERT INTO post (blah blah blah)

DBD::mysql::db do failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '998959523,994399103,'This message posted with trial version of Express News Post' at line 1 at newnews.pl line 741, <SOCK1> line 2375
=====================

Anyone shed any light on this?

Any help greatly appreciated

Cheers

Dibble

[fastforward]

Originally posted by Dibble
Hi,

I have installed the hack on my server
v20010820 (for 2.03)

I think this is a great hack, but I'm having trouble

========================
When I run newnews.pl
- I succesfully connect to the news server
- I get a load of NNTPERROR: 430 No such Article
- Then says fetching xxxx... OK for a while
- NNTPERROR: 421 No next article
- NNTPERROR: 423 No such article in group
- NNTPERROR: 430 No such article a few times
- -> Processing article batch -> requested 56 messages 0 not available or rejected
- -> inserting new threads from alt.comp.periphs.cdr.mitsumi

Then
Query failed
INSERT INTO post (blah blah blah)

DBD::mysql::db do failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '998959523,994399103,'This message posted with trial version of Express News Post' at line 1 at newnews.pl line 741, <SOCK1> line 2375
=====================

Anyone shed any light on this?

Any help greatly appreciated

Cheers

Dibble

The 'No such Article' messages are normal. Read back and you'll see explanations on this.

I'll need to see the full SQL error to tell you what's wrong with the other thing.