[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 Franky
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 ---

reply 1

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

I'll need to do some testing on this.

The situation you describe only occurs when two local posts are made to a usenet post in succession and the quotes are split with the reply inserted between. It's not actually something that I've seen happen on my forums.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by 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

Don't know if you're aware, but that can be written as one sngle cron line ie.

0,15,30,45 * * * * /home/realweb/newnews.pl

Originally posted by fastforward

I'll need to do some testing on this.

The situation you describe only occurs when two local posts are made to a usenet post in succession and the quotes are split with the reply inserted between. It's not actually something that I've seen happen on my forums.

Thank you, I'd appreciate it. It would a perfect script if this could somehow be ironed out.

[DarkReaper]

I've got a problem with quotes also.

>blah blah blah
still in quote, but not in the quote color and lacking a > before it
>blah blah
happens again
>blah blah blah

Yeah but that's just a question of carriage returns and line wrapping being incorrectly parsed. I think my problem is more serious

[DarkReaper]

Its still a problem, and its still annoying.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by DarkReaper
I've got a problem with quotes also.

This is the fault of whatever news client was used to post the message. If you look at the message in outlook or netscape and you'll notice it's exactly the same.

Remember... this script is not intended to be a replacement of either your local forums or a real news client. It was originally written to be a simple archive of usenet posts on a subject related to your local forums.

However, outgoing posts not appearing correctly on usenet is more serious as this may result in negative feedback/complaints to your site.

Originally posted by fastforward

posts not appearing correctly on usenet is more serious as this may result in negative feedback/complaints to your site.

LOL, tell me about it. I got flamed for "top posting" - posting my whole reply and quoting the whole of the original message. In my example below, reply 1 is completely obscured when it's prefixed with a >

[webhost]

Request Please:

Inside of each forum setup there is a field that you set when someone starts a post in that forum that will email you or the email address you place in that field.
Request is that on the usenet forums have a field that does the same thing but only when someone post's or replies to a usenet thread on your board.

I would absolutely love to add this hack to my message board. However, my website host provider (Site5) doesn't offer news services to clients. All of the required perl modules are installed on their servers, so the only thing lacking is a news server that I can have the script log into. Does anyone know of any good news servers out there? Are you folks using the one provided by your host or have you sought elsewhere? Thank you for the feedback
-Mark