[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

[lutek]

I receives this error, and I do not it know how to improve this.
I have put coding latin2 in options

Malformed header from CGI script: ignoring text in character set `WINDOWS-1250' at /forum/newnews.pl line 368 ignoring text in character set `WINDOWS-1250' at /forum/newnews.pl line 368 ignoring text in character set `WINDOWS-1250' at /forum/newnews.pl line 368

[cyc]

great hack, very easy to setup....well done

my problem is quotes are still displayed like [q1]> blah blah...[/q1]

? cant work out how to fix this, so if anyone has any ideas i'd appreciate it!

cheers!

[Steph2k]

Hmm I tried to download this hack (first post), and I wasn't able to..seems like a dead link or server issues?

[cyc]

How do I add a field to enable users to use a bogus email addy?

thanks

[Stephan Whelan]

Hi!

This is a great hack and we have been using it for a long time. However we are starting to look at what we are going to need to do when VB 3.0 comes out. Is this hack going to be re-written for 3.0?

Cheers!

[fastforward]

Originally posted by Stephan Whelan
This is a great hack and we have been using it for a long time. However we are starting to look at what we are going to need to do when VB 3.0 comes out. Is this hack going to be re-written for 3.0?

The new and improved version of this hack is already re-written and has been running on my site for several months. It's all object oriented and just requires a drop-in 'forum' module to work with vB3 or any other version. Obviously a 2.2.9 module is already written.

Basically, an article object is passed to the forum module for insertion, so any forum vendor or version can be easily supported.

The reasons I haven't released it yet are:
1) I still make tweaks every week to the code.
2) There is no easy upgrade path from the existing version.

But rest assured, as soon as vB3 is released, it will be released.

[Stephan Whelan]

fastforward,

Excellent! I shall look forward to seeing the finished version!

[jOOPeON]

URGENT PLEASE!

I have some situation going with people at usenet groups.
They are claiming that I change or fraud the messages they have sent.

They noticed that newnews.pl performs some kind of spell checking while importing. Example:

In usenet -

Q. Is this cool
A. No, it's not

comes in forums like..

A. Is this cool
B. No, it's not

I did some further testing ( after I disabled all kind of things) and I sent this to usenet with my Outlook Express

n:n
A.
Q.
Z.
A.B
C.D

It came in like

n:n
o.
p.
q.
r.B
s.D

What the hell is going on

Any ideas?

-Joop

[fastforward]

This is caused by the Text::Autoformat module. It somethimes tries to be too clever and attempts to re-number lists... a bit like Microsoft and their annoying 'helpful' Word functions.

You can disable wordwrap on incoming articles by commenting out the following lines in newnews.pl

      if ($body =~ /\w/o) {
         $body = autoformat $body, {right=>$config{article_wrap},all=>1};
      }

These appear twice. Once on or around line 446 and again around line 553.

The new version doesn't have this problem.

[jOOPeON]

Thank you!

Now it seems to work like charm!

Regards,

Joop