[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

Questestions

1, does it add alot if size to the database

2, why can't i download it, it says

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /download/usenet_gateway.tar.gz on this server.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apache/1.3.20 Server at britishexpats.com Port 80

[webhost]

did you change file to 755

[fastforward]

Originally posted by btp*
Questestions

1, does it add alot if size to the database

depends on how many newsgroup posts you download.

2, why can't i download it, it says

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /download/usenet_gateway.tar.gz on this server.

That was my fault. I didn't add the 'FollowSymlinks' directive to the Apache conf.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by Brian Cruz
For example, if I didn't want to download a message with "XXX" or "$$$" in the title, how would I set that up?

1. enter XXX in to the Expression field.
2. select 'Header' in the Scope drop down.
3. leave everything else as the default ands click submit

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?

As above, but select 'Body' from the drop down. Not sure why you'd want to block sexy pics of Britney though A regular expression is a 'mask' or 'wildcard'. You can buy complete books on regular expressions. This script uses Perl type regexes.

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

Yes, the contents list is wrong.

[webhost]

I have purged all newsgroups and started over 3 days ago, now total
posts are off again compared to the number of total posts shown in the newsgroups. by 3000.

What would be the fix for this?

[JCDR]

After getting all the modules installed, I ran the newnews.pl file via ssh and got the following??

Killed

?? any ideas?

[fastforward]

Originally posted by webhost
I have purged all newsgroups and started over 3 days ago, now total
posts are off again compared to the number of total posts shown in the newsgroups. by 3000.

What would be the fix for this?

No idea. It doesn't happen on my forums.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by JCDR
After getting all the modules installed, I ran the newnews.pl file via ssh and got the following??

Killed


?? any ideas?

Go back a few pages. There's a couple of posts on this. Make sure you haven't got an old pid file hanging around in the directory.

[JCDR]

Thanks FastForward,

I did do a search for killed but trying to find the message is like trying to find a needle in a umm.........

All sorted now thanks, for some reason the newnews.pl file had newnews2.pl instead of newnews.pl on that line.

[webhost]

No idea. It doesn't happen on my forums.

What is the chance of you looking at the way I have my forums setup
to see if there is something wrong there?