[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

[fastforward]

Originally posted by tamarian


Oh, I think I know your problem, since you mentioned you never added bbcodes before.

Make sure you enter the example part

delete the [ / q ] , and just add them as in the install doc.

in the example just put [q1] test [/q1]

Could that be it?

Another thing that's a bit confusing is the 'Use {option} ?' option. It defaults to yes, but you need to set it to NO

[fastforward]

Originally posted by James Cridland


Well, after a lot of fiddling...

To make a huge increase in the speed, comment out (with the closing brackets, of course):
"if ($h = $c->head($mid)) {" (in get_batch)
"if($b = $c->body($mid)) {" (just after the check for spam)

Then it speeds along, as you say it should (though it doesn't find any to import at the end...)

So, for this novice perl programmer - presumably "head" and "body" are in a module somewhere, and this module needs reinstalling?

hehe. I'm not surprised that speeds things up. Those two lines are the ones that actually grab the article (first the header, then the body) from the news server.

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.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by Shaman
Bug in the subject line:

If there is a "$" in the subject of a new thread (as in "Pentium III 733, $750!", the newnews script will fail.

Can you remember on what line the script failed?

[Shaman]

First things first: any idea when a version will be available for vB 2.0.3? I'm curious mostly because of the security fix, otherwise I'd be happy to leave it be.

Any chance you'd work a deal to include your code with their codebase?

There may be more to the problem, I couldn't immediately reproduce the issue. Will get back to you, but I know I didn't imagine it.

[Sinema]

Howdy

I was curious where I can get the latest version of usenet that has the fixes included in it?

So far I've started @ VBulletin.org and downloaded Usenet there and then went to view the thread and it was posted that I did not have the lastest version .. so I followed the thread here.

After viewing 7 pages of posts I've downloaded Usenet 3-4 times because each time I download it I find a fix or another new version ..

was curious if there was one post that had the fixes and the latest version in one central area that is updated as fixes or new versions come available?

Where it says Usenet I meant the Gateway Hack :-) not the service that provides newsgroups

[george_proost]

hiya Paul,

a little one,

in the signatures when a url in the format :

<url="http://www.xxx.com/yy.htm">linkname</url>

parses (incorrectly) and posts to USENET
it includes the urlname concatenated to the linkname like

www.xxx.com/yy.htmlinkname

instead of

linkname

hope this helps ...

[george_proost]

The post at the top always contatins the latest version + fixes

hope this helps

[Sinema]

Yeah that's what I was thinking but when you see all these download links every few posts .. it can kinda throw you off lol

Thanks again!!
..

[george_proost]

Paul, I use multiple news feeds, some fast, some slow, some free, some subscribed.

Is it possible to (in a very future release)

• sort by newsfeeder (i.e.one login per newnews execution)
• spawn a separate task out per newsfeeder group (wishfull thinking)
• on exit of newnews (successful exit !!) start a cron job for a random start between a period range start the next x and x+y minutes (or something )
  x = I need an update at least evey x minutes average
  y = start no sooner than y minutes from last execution
  so
  next start time = now + y + random(fromset[x])
  
  super wishful thinking

[Sinema]

Howdy again,

I've viewed the old thread .. and after 30+ pages I gave up .. it's like I find someone posting about this and the post above and below never mention how

okay here is the question

I've never used telnet for anything .. so how do I execute the newnews.pl via telnet ?

I downloaded a Telnet program from download.com .. just no clue how to execute the .pl ..

okay this is edited now :-)

I searched and found this

wget http://domain.to/your/newnews.pl --output-file=/dev/null

However when I type it and put the URL to my file nothing happens.. so I'm thinking that's not it ..

Any help would be great ... maybe this will help some other non-telnet users out ..