[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

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Dmitriy
I wonder what are the legal issues of copying posts from public newsgroups and posting them on your own website.

Google is doing the exact same thing at http://groups.google.com/ but does it mean that we can do the same thing too or does google have permissions from all the newsgroups that they allow browser-based access to?

When someone posts to a usenet newsgroup, they know that it is going all over the internet and is being distributed, archived, and read by others. Making a web based interface to access the content is simply like someone using a client to access the content, and is also like another newsgroup server getting a feed from another usenet server.

When the posts are imported into the forums or are on google groups, the content is referenced as to who the author is of that content, just like you would have citations in a paper or publication that you'd write. Since it is properly cited, it does not violate any copyright laws.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by ixian
Please don't take this as insulting, because it isn't meant to be, but, you need to seriously read up on what USENET is because I can't understand why this would even be a question.

Here's your first hint - who would sue you and why?

As a webmaster, living in a country where people will sue over anything, it's good to look into any legal issues that might cost you a lot if someone were to sue you.

[ixian]

Originally posted by Gilby


As a webmaster, living in a country where people will sue over anything, it's good to look into any legal issues that might cost you a lot if someone were to sue you.

This is true, but this example is taking paranioa a little to far. USENET, as you yourself pointed out, is one of the few remaining free bastions of the net. It's cooperative, distributed nature pretty much rules out this kind of lawsuit.

Now, something I did think of - the way this hack works, you need your own USENET client account. It MAY violate terms of service for you to use your ISP's client account to redistribute posts for others. You can get around this by running your own nntp server, like I do. Helps me cut out the spam too.

[Bro_Joey_Gowdy]

anyone have a .zip version of this ?

and will it work with 2.2.6 ?

[Pilot]

Any chance of a PHP version of this? I have a RAQ4 and I am sure these Perl modules aren't installed and I have no idea how to install them!

[Dioxin]

unfortunately the download file doesn't exit on the server.

can you reupload it?

and what's the difference between the cgi version and the php newsgroup gateway? any recommendations?

[certify]

I am having the same problem with Dioxim.

Anybody have the tar or zip file, please post it here.

Thanks.

[NgtCrwlr]

Here ya go... 2.2.4 is what I believe to be the latest version. I'm on my way to catch some zzz's so post here if you have problems downloading.

http://www.makeitsimple.com/download.php

[fastforward]

Sorry I didn't see these posts. I don't seem to get emails from this board anymore. No idea why.

I have been running the new version of this hack on my boards for a couple of months now. It's more robust than the old version and puts less load on the server. It's object oriented as promised and upgrades or addons will be easier.

I still haven't done the indexing routine yet (I don't use it as I use full text indexes). I do intend to do it though. Also the auto expire is not done, but that's easy.

The reason I haven't yet released it yet is that there are huge changes to the database structure and an utomatic upgrade could be be dangerous. The biggest changes are that the message id has been taken out of the post table a new flag colum is added to identify the status . For this reason, I think it would be better to wait until vB version 3 is out as that may require more changes to take advantage of the threading.

However, if anybody wants to empty out their existing usenet posts and start over, I will write the installation instructions this weekend and post it. The current vB module has been tested on versions 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8.

[NgtCrwlr]

Greetings Paul,

Glad to see you're still plugging away at this.

Ironically, last night I decided to check in and see what was up here. After seeing no activity I thought I'd take a shot at fixing the output formatting problems of 2.2.4, and low and behold you show up too.

I'll throw my .02 vote to keep the non-vb3 version around for at least 6 months or more. I have been playing around at the vB3 beta site and from all the discussions I have read and what I've seen so far, it sounds and looks like they have a lot of work to do yet before we will see a usable (public) vB3.

As a usenet article puller your hack works excellent. I seems to me that if the output formatting problems were fixed the 2.2.4 version may be good enough to use as a posting hack too. Last year I pretty much dropped the idea of using this hack for posting to usenet after you told me you really never intend for it to be a posting gateway. So I'm more than thrilled to see you back and I really hope that you can lend a hand at tracking down the last few bugaboo's in 2.2.4.

If you need a working test platform for 2.2.4 you are welcome to use my site. Either tell me what to do or I'll work out a way to give you access.