[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 JCDR
Thanks FastForward,

I did do a search for killed but trying to find the message is like trying to find a needle in a umm.........

All sorted now thanks, for some reason the newnews.pl file had newnews2.pl instead of newnews.pl on that line.

Ahh.. that would be my fault. newnews2.pl is the name of the script I used for testing. Sorry about that. I'll change it to automatically grab the script name at runtime in the next release.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by webhost
No idea. It doesn't happen on my forums.

What is the chance of you looking at the way I have my forums setup
to see if there is something wrong there?

I did look. The only difference is the number of levels.

[Brian Cruz]

Thanks for your help with the spam filter. I've noticed that the script (when running as a cron job) occasionally misses a few posts made to a group. If I purge the group and set last msg to 0, then run the script manually, it downloads what it missed before. Any idea why that might be?

Originally posted by Franky
Eeek something wrong here.

I post a quoted reply, and I get 2 posts (same timestamp)

1.
---
Frank (/i)
(B)test (/B)(/QUOTE)
test
(QUOTE)(i)Originally posted by Frank wrote:
> test


part 2
---

2.
---
Frank wrote:
> test


test again
---

The second appears correctly, but what is the 1st one doing on the newsgroup? PS. Square brackets replaced with round for purpose of this post.

Uhm does anyone have a solution for the above problem...? My usenet forums are disabled at the moment due to this. Thanks.

[webhost]

I did look. The only difference is the number of levels.

FastForward

What is the chance of you glancing at my forum level setup in my control panel. Been trying to resolve this since last week. Would like to put problem to bed if you will help. I believe it to be something simple.

[fastforward]

Originally posted by Franky

Uhm does anyone have a solution for the above problem...? My usenet forums are disabled at the moment due to this. Thanks.

I haven't been able to duplicate this problem yet.

[JCDR]

Hi Guys,

More problems??

#####
NNTPERROR: 502 Permission Denied - Access not permitted (cable modems please use news.cable.ntlworld.com) - newsmaster@ntli.net (Typhoon v1.2.3)
Connecting to news.ntlworld.com:119... Connected
News::NNTPClient unexpected EOF on News::NNTPClient::SOCK1
at ./newnews.pl line 340
Authentication failure at ./newnews.pl line 340, <SOCK1> chunk 1.
News::NNTPClient unexpected EOF on News::NNTPClient::SOCK1
at ./newnews.pl line 0
######

Any ideas on what could be causing the above error

Is it not obvious? 502 Permission Denied - Access not permitted. It even tells you what to do, so why don't you just change the address of the server to the one it tells you?

[JCDR]

Hi Franky,

I did try news.cable.ntlworld.com but the same error appeared, I have included a ntl user and pass.

[orca]

Is your forum on your PC at home and you connect by cable? If your forum is on a hosted server it won't use cable. And if it's on a hosted server, it could be that your news host only supports IP's coming from their IP range (I'm assuming that it's your internet provider you try to get the news from).