[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

[george_proost]

hmmm...

looking at the changes.... lottasa work I think.

I got some the basics working, will wait for the upgrade notes.
Soooo many hacks to apply..

[webhost]

A lot of work, the main thing they just about gutted showthread.php and moved everything to functions.php

[fastforward]

Originally posted by webhost
A lot of work, the main thing they just about gutted showthread.php and moved everything to functions.php

Don't panic. It will all be done within the next few days.

If you've already upgraded your board, the best bet is to install the hack with no code changes (exept control panel access) and set the usenet groups to read only temporarily.

[DarkReaper]

Problem with 2.0.3:

I restored everything from a backup, and got most of it installed ok, until I got to this:

4) Allow access to nntp posting date from templates

showthread.php - line 348

OLD CODE
--------
NO CODE TO REPLACE. Add the following lines directly below the line that currently reads: ' $post[posttime]=vbdate($timeformat,$post[dateline]); '

NEW CODE
--------
// START USENET HACK
$post[nntppostdate]=vbdate($dateformat,$post[nntpdateline]);
$post[nntpposttime]=vbdate($timeformat,$post[nntpdateline]);
// END USENET HACK

I couldn't find the line that reads "$post[posttime]=vbdate($timeformat,$post[dateline]);"

[Stephan Whelan]

I've been using the hack for ages now and it's been working fine.

Saying that (always a but in there somewhere) I recently upgraded to the latest version 20010721 and everything continued to work fine.

Today (after it working for a while) I went in to my database to check the usenet tables as I wanted to make sure it was all setup and optimised (as i've been upgraded since some of the early versions) and found that I was missing a couple of indexes which I added...apart from in usenet_ref table...

msgid and key are supposed to be a Primary Keys, yet I seem to have duplicates in there so cannot add it as a primary key. I'm unclear as to what the table actually does and how having duplicate entries in the msgid and key fields will affect the performance of the news pull script.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

[NgtCrwlr]

functions.php

Around line 80 find:

$post[postdate]=vbdate($dateformat,$post[dateline]);
$post[posttime]=vbdate($timeformat,$post[dateline]);

ADD:

$post[nntppostdate]=vbdate($dateformat,$post[nntpdateline]);
$post[nntpposttime]=vbdate($timeformat,$post[nntpdateline]);

Make sure you add the other functions.php usenet hacks also. If I remember correctly this is the only one that had to be moved

Last night I upgraded from vB 2.0.1 to 2.0.3 and managed to get usenet hack v20010714 (for vB 2.01) installed. I ran newnews.pl without problem, however, I did not test posting.

Tonight I'll tackle the latest usenet hack upgrade, with fingers crossed.

Good luck DarkReaper

regarding the SQL Error of mine... just forget it!

It was all my fault, since i routed the group to the wrong forum! D'oh....

Sorry 4 makin any trouble

[fastforward]

Originally posted by Stephan Whelan
I've been using the hack for ages now and it's been working fine.

Saying that (always a but in there somewhere) I recently upgraded to the latest version 20010721 and everything continued to work fine.

Today (after it working for a while) I went in to my database to check the usenet tables as I wanted to make sure it was all setup and optimised (as i've been upgraded since some of the early versions) and found that I was missing a couple of indexes which I added...apart from in usenet_ref table...

msgid and key are supposed to be a Primary Keys, yet I seem to have duplicates in there so cannot add it as a primary key. I'm unclear as to what the table actually does and how having duplicate entries in the msgid and key fields will affect the performance of the news pull script.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

This is not good. It will definately hurt performance during news loads. It won't cause duplicates in the forums though as outer joins used prior to the load prevent this.
Run the following commands:

CREATE TABLE tmp_usenet_ref AS SELECT * FROM usenet_ref;
TRUNCATE TABLE usenet_ref;
ALTER TABLE usenet_ref add PRIMARY KEY (msgid,ref);
INSERT IGNORE INTO usenet_ref select * FROM tmp_usenet_ref;
DROP TABLE tmp_usenet_ref;

PS: The latest version is usenet_gateway_v20010729__201. It looks like I forgot to update the first post in this thread last time. Sorry.

[webhost]

got any idea what this is?

NNTPERROR: 421 No Next Article
ignoring text in character set `ISO-2022-JP'
at /home/realweb/newnews.pl line 306

[fastforward]

Originally posted by webhost
got any idea what this is?

NNTPERROR: 421 No Next Article
ignoring text in character set `ISO-2022-JP'
at /home/realweb/newnews.pl line 306

I can see we need an FAQ here

The first line is NOT an error. The second line is doing exactly what it's telling you. It's ignoring that particular character set because it's not what you have set in your control panel. It will still be processed by the rest of the script, but it won't have MIME conversion done on it.