[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

[JCDR]

Hi orca,

The site is on a dedicated server - with a host -, and yes it is an ISP I am trying to get the news from, I presume franky uses ntl for his newsgroups what setting do you use mate?

[orca]

I use a free newsserver without any passwords. Found it by doing a search for free newsserver in google.

[webhost]

orca

Can you write to that free sever?

[JCDR]

Thanks for all you help over the last few weeks guys, I would have gone out of my mind without you it all seems to be working okay down on the test forums using a free newsserver all I need now is for franky to tell me the set-up for ntl? please

[bitbender]

In my travels with Google, I have located several free servers. I did, however heed the advice given by J. Cridland in this thread. And I have experienced stabilty issues wereas they are not up all the time.

On the other hand...they were instrumental in helping me get going with this hack, and so are good for that purpose. The ones I found allow posting, but tend to have alot of spam (or so say my filters!).

I ended up spending the small amount of change for a paid service, and the news server that my broadband provider supplies. Great results!

If any one wants the small list I have compiled, please PM me, or email me, I will be glad to give 'em up. I'd post 'em here, but I don' know if that's a violation of the rules.

Once again, FastF, this is about the coolest thing for the board I could think of! My membership (albeit small) is already raving over the effect's!! If I could buy you a pint, I'd ship you a case!!

From one programmer to another, very nice piece of work!

Hey Paul,

Yer hack still workin fine with me.

I have a suggestion though:
What about makin it possible, when searching for new posts, to display not all new usenet messages, but those messages, where board members have participated in?

Any chance?

-Alex

[JCDR]

When a user of our forums post's a reply to the usenet group, how long will this take to show up in the usenet group (ie not on the forums in outlook express for example) As I posted a test message but the message has yet to be posted to the usenet group but has shown up on our forums.

any ideas?

[fastforward]

Originally posted by JCDR
When a user of our forums post's a reply to the usenet group, how long will this take to show up in the usenet group (ie not on the forums in outlook express for example) As I posted a test message but the message has yet to be posted to the usenet group but has shown up on our forums.

any ideas?

It goes out the next time you run the script. How long it takes before it shows up on the news server is dependent on each server. Assuming the post was accepted, and you are reading from the same server to which you posted, it should be only a few minutes.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by Pie'oh'pah
What about makin it possible, when searching for new posts, to display not all new usenet messages, but those messages, where board members have participated in?

Yeah, that should be easy. Usenet posts made by forum members can be identified by a '-1' in the isusenetpost column in the post table.

It might take me a few weeks to get around to it though. I'm in the middle of re-doing BritishExpats.com. It's still running vB 1.1.6 so I think it's about time I did something about it.

You can make the change yourself if you like. It's easy peasy. Find the line that was added by the usenet hack in search.php. It should read:
$wheresql.=" AND thread.isusenetpost=0";
Change that to:
$wheresql.=" AND thread.isusenetpost=0 AND post.isusenetpost <= -1";

If you just want threads that were started by members, change it to:
$wheresql.=" AND thread.isusenetpost <= -1";


bitbender:
Thanks for your kind words.

[Brian Cruz]

Originally posted by fastforward

It goes out the next time you run the script. How long it takes before it shows up on the news server is dependent on each server. Assuming the post was accepted, and you are reading from the same server to which you posted, it should be only a few minutes.

I had waited 24 hours and the posts never showed up, but after making a post and running the script manually, the post would appear in only a few minutes (the older ones were still MIA). I figured out how to restart my crond daemon, and the last post I made went through, so maybe that was the problem.

I've also noticed that when outgoing posts which contain quotes appear on usenet, the quoted text has blank lines between them. They look like this:

Juan F. Lara wrote:
> Years ago I heard that Warner Brothers Television Animation was going to

> make an "Osmosis Jones" TV series to go along with the movie. Whatever

> happened to that TV series? Are they still going to make it?


Is that normal for the script or did I set up something wrong?