[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]

Dear Paul (FF),

The intention is not to rattle your cage. I'd never do that.
All I wanted to do was make notes etc.. while I went along.
Be assured, you are doing a tremendously good job here.
I want to cooperate.

The red, ... yea is red ... for me outstanding issues
the green, things that seem fixed. due to my muddling around.

It's looking better everey day...

The sad part is that I have been told to move my server, I
apparently crashed a shared server out 3-4 times, a 'kernel panic' they said... whatever that means.

Any ideas for a good ISP.

[orca]

George, try http://www.venturesonline.com

I run the gateway there now for 3 days. No complaint yet. They even installed the modules for me without any problems. I only had to ask for them .

[george_proost]

it is www.venturesonline.com that are dumping me ...

[fastforward]

HostPro/vservers are very good. I used their Freedom servers (semi dedicated) before I moved to a dedicated at Dialtone.

George... just ignore my outburst earlier. I was having a bad day at work (no change there) I apologize.

Has anybody installed the latest with bug fixes yet?

[orca]

I did and I don't seem to have any problem yet. Works smoothly. Well, I don't have console output on anymore. Used to have many "duplicate entry" if there were new posts.

[edit]
Just checked, everything ok.
[/edit]

[fastforward]

Originally posted by orca
I did and I don't seem to have any problem yet. Works smoothly. Well, I don't have console output on anymore. Used to have many "duplicate entry" if there were new posts.

Those messages have now been suppressed. I wasn't aware that these were happening before. It must be specific to the Perl MySQL module version as I just upgraded and it started happening to me. They were never real errors though, just informational messages.

[george_proost]

is this a suitable config ?


Intel Server
866 MHZ Pentium III, 256KB cache
512 MB ECC RAM
20.5 GB, EIDE Hard Drive
Webhost Manager and Cpanel3
25 GB of Burstable Traffic


software
============
Apache 1.3.17
RedHat 6.2
PHP4.0.4PL1
MySQL Ver 11.12 Distrib 3.23.32, for pc-linux-gnu(i686)
Perl 5.6.0
Zlib
Pre-installed cgi scripts

It will only run 1 vBulletin

[orca]

At george: Yeah, it looks quite good.
It seems that newnews may cause server troubles because today I can't get to my site. No ping time and no trace possible...
But not sure whether it is that script...No mail from venturesonline yet.

[george_proost]

is the provider. Paul L has been a great help. I thank him for it.

[george_proost]

Hi All,
I move my domain to a new server etc....
Installed all required modules etc ....

I get :

bash-2.04$ perl newnews.pl
News::NNTPClient: Can't connect socket: Connection timed out at newnews.pl line 274
Connecting to news.newzpig.com... Connected
News::NNTPClient: News::NNTPClient::SOCK1 has been closed
 at newnews.pl line 278
Authentication failure at newnews.pl line 278.
Sending authentication info....

I am a perl beginner ..

TIA