[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

[webhost]

Fastforward

All fixed I had a total of 2369 usenet post's in the psot table even though I deleted all of them, they showed in th db as having userid zero, so Kier gave me this command to run and they are removed and usenet count is set to zero to restart. This is the command he gave me,

DELETE FROM post WHERE userid=0




This ended working out pretty good by doing it I cut the length of my opening page 40%.

My forum here http://forums.realwebhost.net
Usenet at bottom

[James Cridland]

Originally posted by fastforward
However, by doing that, you have established the problem is probably with the news server and not the script. Do you have access to another news server you can try? If not, PM me your IP and I will give you temporary access to my DNews server for testing.

After a re-install of perl onto a different machine, so that the main server doesn't have to cope with the processor load, I'm now running the gateway again. (Quite disappointed to see that my documentation for W32 didn't make it into the latest release).

Anyway, my speed problem - up to 90 seconds per retrieved post - seems to be down to my local ISP's news server at news.btinternet.com... I've tried testing the script with news.grc.com, a public news server dedicated to internet security, and it gets approximately two new messages a second, which looks quite acceptable in comparison!

This is Good News, up to a point: since there are no free NNTP servers for W32 that I can find, I still need to work on sourcing a new news server to use.

Wonder what the problem is?

[webhost]

Small problem

My cron job which as ran ok for awhile is having problems even though it is setup the same way. Not getting any data
So I went to telnet and ran manually.
the first time I try to run the script from telnet, I enter it and it comes back and says killed, I run it again and it works fine.
It does the same way everytime, it fails the first saying killed but always runs the second time. Any ideas what is causing this?

Originally posted by fastforward
Actually, there's a new version coming out tomorrow or over the weekend that fixes outgoing mail notification and 'top posting' among other things. Don't worry though, it's only a newnews.pl drop-in replacement.

[high]* Franky really want's to see this [/high]

[fastforward]

Release 20010820
more tweaks to newnews.pl.

• Rewrote indexing routine to be much faster & more efficient
• Fixed outgoing email notification
• Takes some advantage of InnoDB and Gemini transactions if available
• Outgoing posts no longer top post
• Lots of other little tweaks

To upgrade, you just need to replace your existing newnews.pl with the one in this package.

All links in every post point to the latest version of this hack.

Eeek something wrong here.

I post a quoted reply, and I get 2 posts (same timestamp)

1.
---
Frank (/i)
(B)test (/B)(/QUOTE)
test
(QUOTE)(i)Originally posted by Frank wrote:
> test

part 2
---

2.
---
Frank wrote:
> test

test again
---

The second appears correctly, but what is the 1st one doing on the newsgroup? PS. Square brackets replaced with round for purpose of this post.

[dwh]

One suggestion, I think creating a whole new style for this hack is a bit of overkill. It doesn't work for me because I keep changing templates. I think some modification of showthread.pl should be possible to make the posts show up nicer w/o having to create a brand new style. It'll probably be a couple of weeks but I'll look at the code soon.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by dwh
One suggestion, I think creating a whole new style for this hack is a bit of overkill. It doesn't work for me because I keep changing templates. I think some modification of showthread.pl should be possible to make the posts show up nicer w/o having to create a brand new style. It'll probably be a couple of weeks but I'll look at the code soon.

Yeah, I toyed with the idea of this but I was concerned with the extra support these changes might need. I've tried to minimize the code changes (even if they are optional). I've been hoping that Jelsoft will change the way templates, styles and replacements are all tied together as one entity. If they could be referenced seperately, it would make things a lot more flexible. You might want to look at the 'conditionals in templates' hack that Ed Sullivan posted.

[dwh]

heh heh, yup seems we're on the same wavelength...

[Brian Cruz]

I've just installed this hack and it's working very well so far. I have a question about the spam control feature. All the options there are a bit confusing to me, and I'm not quite sure how to make it do what I want. For example, if I didn't want to download a message with "XXX" or "$$$" in the title, how would I set that up? What about a post that had the text "Britney Spears sexy pics" in the body, not the title? What exactly does "treat as regular expression" do?

Also, in the vb_code_changes.txt, is the list of changes wrong? I don't see any instructions for change #5.