[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

[WildWayz]

ya - I thought it was gonna work on 2.2.1 too - but it doesn't fully work - I CAN post things to the newsgroup - but ONLY if I click on "Quote". Reply/New Thread = no submission to usenet

--James

[Tim Wheatley]

How's it working at the moment? You have to post something, quote it in a reply and what you quote in the reply is posted?

[bitbender]

Y'all, I believe that FastForward said earlier (a few posts ago) that a complete rewrite for VB 2.2.1 was in the works, and will be forthcoming. From his comments, I suggest waiting.

It works well on my current board(2.0.3), but I have not tried to apply it to my upgrade to 2.2.1. I'm sorta waiting until it's available.

I have alot of hacks to reapply to my 2.2.1 build, and from the results of the current usenet hack, i'm more than willing to wait, even if it means staying on 2.0.3 for a while longer. FF has done a totally stellar job on this, and I can't imagine how much better the new one's gonna be!!

The way it works on my board is that when one of my member ship post a reply to a usenet thread, it looks just like any other post.

I have the newnews.pl script setup to execute twice daily. At those times, any replies made to usenet posts are posted back to the usenet server, and newsgroup the thread originated from. When it does this, it issues messages to indicate it has posted a reply, and if email notification is enabled, a email is sent to the forum member that the thread reply was posted to the usenet group server.

After the the newnews.pl script has completed execution, you should be able to go to the usenet newsgroup via Outlook epress (or any news group viewer) and see the reply.

This is the procedure I used to certify that all was in place and working as expected.

(Hope I got it right, FF! :wink: )

Tim, I hope this helps, else, holla at me again!

Bit's

I went and posted a few replies, and ran the script manually, this is what I got! It's a PNG image, so it's very small:

[GameCrash]

Yes, that will be a great for my C# site as MS provides many newsgroups... when do you think you can give us a vB 2.2.1 version?

[Sanjiyan]

I am gettng this error message: (Please see that attached Image1.jpg to display the error message....)

I am running:

Windows 2000 Server
Apache Win32
PHP 4.1.1 (lastest stable from the php site)
MySQL 3.23.47-nt
ActivePerl 5.6

I have printed off and followed the install instructions to the letter and did the PPM install of the relvent packages but I am getting this error message. I would really love to use this usenet hack, and so I am asking everyone here for help.

Please either reply here or email me at sanjiyan@blueyonder.co.uk

I thank you in advance, plus a bog bog bog box of Roses to who ever helps me

[Sanjiyan]

I fixed this problem my self, I just deleted Perl and reinstalled it all again.

Now I am getting
NNTPERROR: 430 No Such Article

errors...

looking into that now

[Sanjiyan]

Urm

Quote codes:

6. Usenet quotes can be wrapped in custom bbcodes, according to the level of the quote (up to three levels). You can set the colours and indent levels of the quotes by adding the following bbcodes to your current style set as follows:

[q1] REPLACED WITH &nbsp;&nbsp;<font size="1" color="blue">{param}</font>
[q2] REPLACED WITH &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<font size="1" color="darkred">{param}</font>
[q3] REPLACED WITH &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<font size="1" color="green">{param}</font>

This is mentioned int he install.txt file yet I still dont understand or know where do I put this text so it works?? just I cant find where to dump it, any one got any ideas?? Of course you have, alot of you arent a newbie at this like me and are experienced??

[bitbender]

One of the things one needs to do is to browse the news group, and collect the starting numbers for the articles. Not providing a starting point did not seem to work well for me.

Once I gave an article# starting point for each of the news groups I was extracting from, things began to flow much smoother. The article# can be extracted from the header information of a message. I used Outcrook Express, subscribed to each newsgroup, retrieved new messages for each of the news groups, and then sorted by received date, and then used today-1 message's to extract my article numbers, via the properties button, once you open an individual news item.

As for the Perl Reinstall, I had to do that also. I found an excellent procedure for an integrated Apache/Perl distribution for Win32, and that procedure turned out to be a working combination for my board, and W2K .

Sanjiyan

Add those to your BB codes section under the Amin panel. Then, when the posts are displayed, you can see them. They work great on my board!

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by bitbender
Sanjiyan

Add those to your BB codes section under the Amin panel. Then, when the posts are displayed, you can see them. They work great on my board! [/B]

I've just tried this, but it does not seem to work, all it says is:

is replaced with ()
[edit] [remove]

is replaced with ()
[edit] [remove]

is replaced with ()
[edit] [remove]



Am I being thick?

Sanjiyan

[webhost]

Been running this script for months, then this morning I get this error.

Database error in vBulletin: Invalid SQL: SELECT COUNT(*) AS posts FROM post WHERE isusenetpost=0
mysql error:
mysql error number:
Date: Tuesday 22nd of January 2002 07:00:44 AM
Script: /vbulletin/index.php3
Referer:

Any ideas anyone?