[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

[webhost]

go to a search engine and search for cron,

The other errors that is something for fastforward.

Originally posted by 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.

Installation
------------

1. Install the required perl modules:

http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=NNTPClient

PS. A 1 line crontab is: 0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /full/path/to/newnews.pl >/dev/null 2>&1

[webhost]

PS. A 1 line crontab is: 0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /full/path/to/newnews.pl >/dev/null 2>&1

The one I use will work also but I do have 1 question, what is this for Franky
>/dev/null 2>&1

[fastforward]

Originally posted by webhost


The one I use will work also but I do have 1 question, what is this for Franky
>/dev/null 2>&1

That line ensures that the actual newnews.pl output is redirected aswell as the output generated by cron. Remember, cron is just a progam that calls newnews.pl.

[webhost]

ok understand but without it I get a email for every cron job so do I even need it?

[fastforward]

Originally posted by webhost
ok understand but without it I get a email for every cron job so do I even need it?

If you don't mind getting an email for every cron job... then, no, you don't need it.

Yeah but who want's an e-mail for every cron job? Once I know it's working ok, it's pointless getting, in my case, 6 e-mails an hour telling me the same thing.

[webhost]

How would you know if for some reason it quick working and you go to your forum and find out that it hasn't downloaded for 3 hours. Meanwhile your users are expecting a answer from a post they made. Just wandering, I don't like the emails either, just wandering if you have a way that would tell us when or if it has stopped working. I was hoping you would share with us and I could turn all my emails off.

Thanks Franky

Well I can't personally see a way via crontab that you could have error reporting, all crontab does is to run the job and e-mail output. There is a possibility that fastforward could build error reporting into the perl script in a future version, therefore eliminating the need for lots of cron e-mails *hint hint*

I have found a problem with the script.

I post something which is shown below, snipping the irrelvent parts of the original post and quoting the relevent parts I wish to reply to, like below:

--- Begin Example ---

quoted text block 1

reply 1

quoted text block 2

reply 2
--- End Example ---

In this instance, the post on the newsgroup will read:

---
reply 2
>>quoted text block 1
>reply 1
>>quoted text block 2
---

Am I missing something here? It's completely in the wrong order, and my 1st reply is prefixed by >

PS. I got the right thread 2nd time round