[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

[orca]

George, it seems that you gave wrong login info to the news server.
The problem I had is resolved. It wasn't the script. Just ran it again and now problems anymore.

[george_proost]

I think I chaged something

news.xxxxxxx.com:????

I took the :???? off could that be it...
what was the port number anyway ?

[orca]

Port for news is usually 119, however, you may don't need to supply it because the script does it. If it would be missing, the error would rather be not connected than login failure. Be sure that you supply the correct username and password. If it's anonymous, you can leva the fields blank in most cases.

[george_proost]

doing test loads now ... all ok so far.

.. need to check the [q] ... [/q] substitution somewhere

[orca]

Hmm, never looked at that yet...
Anyway, I found a bug, I think: In a newsgroup I replied to a topic as first person. Now there are 4 more replies after me but I'm still listed as the last poster.

[george_proost]

I have put in the new code, it is running.

I am struggling a bit with the [qx] definitions. Please help

newnews.pl leaves a dummy zombie job active each time it has run! Please help


Btw FF, there is a way to link the posts more accurately... I do not know the code but have seen the opportunity. Some posts seem to detach themselves from threads but are clearly part of an existing thread. ( I like to avoid pruning )

current linking
==========
Subject Thread 1
Re: Subject Thread 1 post 1
Re: Subject Thread 1 post 2

seems to be the general rule, however, multilingual news/mail clients can use a different prefix eg :

AW: Subject Thread 1 post x (I think these are handled - German) but seen some stray ones

Fw: Subject Thread 1 post z ( i've seen a couple sneak through here)

Antw: Re: Subject Thread 1 post y (Antw: = Reply in Dutch, I think you can strip that off as standard)

These are just comments, if you do see the opportunity and you feel it is relevant .. please.

I picked these examples from here (currently reloading)

[orca]

George, I saw now where you have the problem. I had this first, too. You can fix it if you fill EVERY line of the bb-Code. Here's what I filled in for q1:

vB Code Tag: q1
vB Code Replacement:

PHP Code:

&nbsp;&nbsp;<font size="1" color="blue">{param}</font> 


vB Code Example:

PHP Code:

[q1]Usenet1[/q1] 


vB Code Explanation:

PHP Code:

Used for Usenet 


Use {Option}?: No.

Hope this helps.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by george_proost
I have put in the new code, it is running.

I am struggling a bit with the [qx] definitions. Please help

newnews.pl leaves a dummy zombie job active each time it has run! Please help


Btw FF, there is a way to link the posts more accurately... I do not know the code but have seen the opportunity. Some posts seem to detach themselves from threads but are clearly part of an existing thread. ( I like to avoid pruning )

current linking
==========
Subject Thread 1
Re: Subject Thread 1 post 1
Re: Subject Thread 1 post 2

seems to be the general rule, however, multilingual news/mail clients can use a different prefix eg :

AW: Subject Thread 1 post x (I think these are handled - German) but seen some stray ones

Fw: Subject Thread 1 post z ( i've seen a couple sneak through here)

Antw: Re: Subject Thread 1 post y (Antw: = Reply in Dutch, I think you can strip that off as standard)

These are just comments, if you do see the opportunity and you feel it is relevant .. please.

I picked these examples from here (currently reloading)

The subject is not used in these examples. The messages are threaded according to the 'References' field in the article header. The examples you are showing are simply where people are not using their news clients correctly and are starting a new thread to answer an existing thread.

[george_proost]

thanks Paul, sorry for some of the stupid questions.

I got the quotes working forgot the ; use { option } no

looking gooood.

Now the zombies, anyone else with them. I now have 197 Zombies ??

I'm still trying to work out solution to posts being loaded with threadid 0 and bodies not showing up under threads ( I know it's boring). By now I tried three perl versions on two machines with same effect.
Yet I know it worked, I had it running till last rc of vbb2.0. Then on some point it just stopped. Even if i do a fresh install of vbb 2.0.1 and install snapshots from my data the usenet posts still get inserted with thread = 0. There must be some method to this madness.
Is there any possiblity that this bug is caused not by perl version or DBI DBD modules but by database structure? Maybe my base vbb is missing something, some index or row? Is there any tool to compare structure with original vbb setup?