[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

[DarkReaper]

For some reason the usenet posts show up when I click get new threads and get today's active threads. I put the code below in search.php and they're still there:

$wheresql.=" AND thread.open<>10";
// START USENET HACK
if (!$includeusenetpostsingetnew) { $wheresql.=" AND thread.isusenetpost=0"; };
// END USENET HACK

AND

$wheresql.=" AND thread.open<>10";
// START USENET HACK
if (!$includeusenetpostsingetnew) { $wheresql.=" AND thread.isusenetpost=0"; };
// END USENET HACK

[JCDR]

Does anyone know any free news servers so I can do a few tests to see is everything is working a okay??

Superb hack by the way just what the doctor ordered.

[JCDR]

Hi,

The only thing left is to collect the news using the newnews.pl script. How??

Any help is very much appreciated.

[webhost]

DarkReaper

Did you deselect it in the usenet control panel options?

[webhost]

JCDR

The only thing left is to collect the news using the newnews.pl script. How??

Telnet and the best way is to setup a cron job

[JCDR]

Thanks for the reply Webhost, any chance you could post the code for it?

[webhost]

When using telent go to your telnet and then cd to where you have newnews.pl located at and type in ./newnews.pl then enter the script will run. for telnet you can download putty.exe here at this link http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~s.../download.html
or here http://www.realwebhost.net/putty.exe
when using a cron job this is my example i run a cron job every 15 minutes like this
0 * * * * /home/realweb/newnews.pl
15 * * * * /home/realweb/newnews.pl
30 * * * * /home/realweb/newnews.pl
45 * * * * /home/realweb/newnews.pl

[JCDR]

Cheers webhost,

I have putty downloaded already, I'll have a go at running the *.pl file in a moment, how do you set the cron to run automatically eveny 15 minutes or so isn't there a file I need to upload or something?

[webhost]

I have cron as apart of my hosting service, let me look around

[JCDR]

Hi WB

Sorry for all the questions

Below is the error returned when running the newnews.pl file via ssh

Can't locate News/NNTPClient.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/libdata/perl/5.00503/mach /usr/libdata/perl/5.00503 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/i386-freebsd /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005 .) at ./newnews.pl line 42.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./newnews.pl line 42.