[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 DarkReaper


ROFL. Flame me, kick me, torture me, I deserve it. Before the <?php... in newthread.php there was...guess what! 8/10/08...how the hell did that get there and what is it? lol!

[webhost]

Question when reindexing search index on board via the control panel under update counters, does the usenet groups always get included or is there away to stop this from happening?

[fastforward]

Originally posted by webhost
Question when reindexing search index on board via the control panel under update counters, does the usenet groups always get included or is there away to stop this from happening?

Once the usenet posts are in your forum they are treated just like any other post.

[webhost]

Question, when running the script it fetchs messages rather quickly, but it boggs down some when it starts finding replies. Is there any way to speed this up in the script?

[george_proost]

Hi FF and other hack users,

Hmm... special case me thinks..

• I use multiple newsfeeds
• The newsgroup in question has it's own footer message
• the posting user uses show signature
• signature and return email usenet data is present
• spam filtering is not used outgoing

symptoms:
the correct signature and footer message are shown in usenet newsgroup but the post text 'body' is missing. Any ideas.

I have had this great hack working since spring.
I upgraded to the latest version at last week and everything seems to be ok, but I cannot find new threads or replies from news server.
This started last friday, when one user send me a mail and told me, that new threads doesn't show on news servers. Today I noticed, that even the replies dissapears somewhere.

When testing, console says:
Connecting to news.kolumbus.fi... Connected
Posting message by mphelsinki to sfnet.test... Sent

Pulling sfnet.test... No new messages.
Clean disconnection from news.kolumbus.fi

What could be wrong ?

-Joop

[shadowbreed]

I don't know if this has been covered before but i have the following problem:

When using new thread, my threads show up fine on the newsserver, but when using reply or quote, nothing gets send

newnews.pl doesn't give any errors

any ideas?

[bitbender]

I have some questions:

1. The expiration routines. How do they work? Under what criteria do they expire threads ?
2. Should usenet posts be threaded into forums of the same name for easy segmentation? (like COMP.OS.LINUX.SETUP)
3. If I start a thread in one of the segregated usenet groups, will it thread it out to the named usenet group for reply ??

Thanks!

[AJR]

I just installed the usenet hack... had to wait 2 days for the host to install all the modules, but everything seems to be in order now! I just newnews.pl for the first time... the message gathering went smoothly. At the end of fetching the first 500 messages, it started to process the batch. From here, this is what is shown in telnet:

-> processing article batch...
-> requested 500 messages... 0 not available or rejected
-> inserting new threads from rec.games.pinball
-> inserted 166 threads
-> finding replies...

Query failed:
TRUNCATE TABLE usenet_article_loader

DBD::mysql::db do failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'TABLE usenet_article_loader' at line 1 at newnews.pl line 741, <SOCK1> chunk 21940.

Any ideas? Is this bad? All the tables have been created. I can see the 166 threads it inserted, but none have replies. Before I grab the next batch of 500, I'd like to know what to do. The site is at http://www.vpforums.com but I have the Usenet groups hidden (shown only to admins) while I'm setting them up. Any help would be appreciated.

[AJR]

Can anyone help with my problem above please...