[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

[george_proost]

goto the directory where newnews.pl is installed then type

perl newnews.pl

I advise you to be familliar with what you are doing. This change to vBulletin is NOT for the faint-hearted.

[James Cridland]

Originally posted by george_proost
I advise you to be familliar with what you are doing. This change to vBulletin is NOT for the faint-hearted.

I would agree with that. For this user, at least, the extra perl overhead has sadly meant that my little server can't cope with running it at the moment.

I think I'll try again later at some stage, but perl is now vaped (again!) from my server.

Sinema, I needed help with this hack. I even know quite a bit about Telnet. But I don't know how to install Perl modules or "read" the newnews.pl script. You may want to hire a professional Perl person to assist you getting set up. It wouldn't take them more than about two hours.

You also need a paid NNTP feed.

J

[fastforward]

Originally posted by george_proost
Is it possible to (in a very future release)

• sort by newsfeeder (i.e.one login per newnews execution)
  

• Not sure I understand. Can you elaborate?
  

  spawn a separate task out per newsfeeder group (wishfull thinking)
  

  Possible, and with Activestate now supporting 'fork', it should work under NT aswell. The problem is the load. On large batch jobs, the many successive MySQL inserts already causes a high server load. Imagine the problem with 3 or copies running simultaneously.
  

  on exit of newnews (successful exit !!) start a cron job for a random start between a period range start the next x and x+y minutes (or something )
  
  x = I need an update at least evey x minutes average
  y = start no sooner than y minutes from last execution
  so
  next start time = now + y + random(fromset[x])
  

  Yep... good idea. I'd probably make use of this so I'll look at adding it sooner rather than later

[dwh]

Just to clarify, I read correctly that this isn't 2.03 compliant yet? I have the old release installed but I want the new fixes but will wait if the new version is still in dev.

[george_proost]

Hi Paul, develop we must !

sort by newsfeeder (i.e.one login per newnews execution)
currenty my newnews does

FEED1 then FEED2 then FEED3 again FEED1 again FEED3

this is due to the order of processing (order of creating the feeds), it would be 'more efficient' if the feeds were sucked out one at a time like :

FEED1 then FEED2 then FEED3 and done.

spawn a separate task out per newsfeeder group (wishfull thinking) need power then. nice 'option' though,
however the question arose due to the FEED1 above being sloooow sometimes causing the faster feeds to timeout (killed by next suck session) resulting in degraded updates on the faster FEEDS

A solution would be to 'prioritise' each feed for sucking.

the CRON will solve some of the slow sucking as each session will run to completion, however I feel now an on/off toggle would be needed as well in the options for this.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In short a prioritise on FEED not sort would address most of the requirements above.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

lol ... has become a requirement

so the result in may case would be:

FEED2 then FEED3 then FEED1 (perhaps all spawned and rescheduled )

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for your enthusiasm to grow your tool.

(sounds like one of those enlarge your ... spams)

[fastforward]

Originally posted by dwh
Just to clarify, I read correctly that this isn't 2.03 compliant yet? I have the old release installed but I want the new fixes but will wait if the new version is still in dev.

You'll probably find it works fine. Obviously the line numbers for the php edits may have shifted slightly, but just search for the relevant bits. Also, remember that none of the code changes are necessary for this hack to run (discounting the minor html addition for control panel access).

If necessary, I'll release updated instructions for 2.03 over the weekend.

[dwh]

When I'm done updating the templates, I'll try to upgrade to the latest version and let u know if there were any problems. In fact, I'll enjoy it this time because last time I just wanted it to work. This time I will try to understand better what you're doing.

[orca]

showthread.php has changed the most. Else the hack works fine with 2.0.3. For the stars hack, I had to edit admin/functions.php instead of showthread.php. I try this now also with this hack.

I just edited functions.php and it works. Instead of editing showthread.php you need to look for the same strings in admin/functions.php and add the code there.

[shri]

Just a quick FYI. I upgraded to 2.0.3 forgetting that newnews.pl was running as a cron job. So far no problems other than the fact that its missing from the control panels