[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 Lee Herron
Is there a simple test to confirm if you have nntp installed on your box or not? Would prefer to know before I attempt to install one.

If you mean the Perl NNTP modules; the best test is to run the script and see what fails It will tell you which modules it can't find.

Man, a thread search would be nice on a thread this long uh?

You should've seen the last thread!

[bitbender]

I had a weird error situation requiring hours of recovery(thx VB Staff for the how to's!! ) for some non-usenet threads that disappeared. I'm pretty sure that it was not related to this addition, but wanted to know for sure. Your answer clarified it well.

thanks!

[psx-dude]

So this will allow me to mirror a newsgroup on my server? Won't that take up a LOT of database/disk space?

[AJR]

Well this is strange... I am testing new threads and replies in my usenet group. When the message is sent, I open up my Agent newsreader and I see the messages that were sent from the forum, BUT the first lines are missing. For example, I type in:

Testing the new usenet group reader from http://www.vpforums.com

Come play actual pinball machines on your PC!

In Agent, the message shows up only as:

Come play actual pinball machines on your PC!

I sent a reply to another usenet message as well that was only 1 line, and it showed up in the correct message thread in Agent, but only showed my signature. The text I typed was missing! So I'm assuming it's chopping off my first line or 2 of text. Any reason for this? I have the SPAM filter on outgoing messages set to OFF. Everything else looks good! HELP!!

[KimG]

Originally posted by fastforward

Actually, you can do it. Just create a regular expression that rejects everything except the ones you want. You'll need to read up on regular expressions to get it right.

Hi,
I've been reading up and have tried to construct an expression:
[*] >"xxx[a-z]"

where xxx is the word that you want to retrieve followed by any letter in the header. Any other posts would be filtered out as spam? Is this along the right lines??

Thanks!

Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong?

This is the error:

Database error in vBulletin: Invalid SQL: SELECT iconid, title FROM thread WHERE forumid= ORDER BY lastpost DESC LIMIT 1
mysql error: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'ORDER BY lastpost DESC LIMIT 1' at line 1
mysql error number: 1064
Date: Friday 21st of September 2001 07:43:38 AM
Script: /forums/editpost.php
Referer: http://helpdesk.hostbet.com/forums/e...tpost&postid=5

[shri]

Fastforward,

I've posted some perl code here .. which may help decode binary attachments.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showt...threadid=28992

If its not a priority for you ... Hopefully someone here is a perl guru who can help out?

I am trying to get clari.* content into the board and they have a lot of articles which come attached with gif / jpg photos.

[DarkReaper]

Who's posted doesn't work with this(2.0.3). When I click on the reply count it says "{Name of thread starter}: {number of replies}" and that's it.

[shadowbreed]

Originally posted by shadowbreed
I don't know if this has been covered before but i have the following problem:

When using new thread, my threads show up fine on the newsserver, but when using reply or quote, nothing gets send

newnews.pl doesn't give any errors

any ideas?

Still have this problem, can anyone offer some help?

Now just MY users get to see the replies and not the people on the newsserver

Now i also have the following problem:


-> fetching 39349... OK -> fetching 39350... OK -> fetching 39351... OK -> fetching 39352... OK -> fetching 39353... OK -> fetching 39354... OK -> fetching 39355... OK NNTPERROR: 421 No Next Article NNTPERROR: 423 No Such Article In Group NNTPERROR: 421 No Next Article NNTPERROR: 423 No Such Article In Group NNTPERROR: 421 No Next Article -> processing article batch... -> requested 303 messages... 0 not available or rejected. -> inserting new threads from alt.macromedia.flash -> inserted 0 threads -> finding replies...

As you can see it does process everything but nothing gets inserted???

Can anyone please help??

[shadowbreed]

Has anyone had these problems??