Rewrite of forum <--> news script

Off-topic
1

As you probably know, the messages in these forums are linked to both a USENET newsgroup and a mailing list. In order to gateway all this together, some programming is required to send and receive the posts so they make it everywhere and are in a good format for all to easily read. There are a lot of problems with the current script (program) that does this gateway between the newsgroup and these forums, so I am going to rewrite this script in PHP (the original is in perl, which is less flexible with my knowledge) and I’d like to know what you want in this new version. What annoyances have you had with how it currently is and what would you like to see it do?

Here are my ideas to try to focus on:

  • Fix the input of posts into threads: no more duplicates, and all posts get inserted into forum even if thread can't be found (before, I had to manually insert these lost posts).
  • Fix the output of forum messages to display nicer, with no broken URLs and clean line breaks.
  • Insert posts without formatting (I already changed this one).
  • Recognize broken URLs in incoming posts
  • Allow attachments to show up in outgoing posts (just links)
  • Allow polls to be posted to the newsgroup
  • Insert HTML messages without showing the html. (these really shouldn't be posted to the newsgroup, but they are, so I have to deal with it:))
  • remove quoted text (just the long stuff that some people leave on the bottom of their emails)
  • Email to PM (private message) with time limited email addresses (to prevent spam)
  • Send email to people who post through the newsgroup
  • Possibly separate into many forums that all are gatewayed to the newsgroup (ie. have forums for trials, freestyle, muni, general, reviews, etc).

What did I miss?

If you have features that you want to be in these forums that are not (in addition to the changes I am making to the gateway), please let me know. There are many ‘hacks’ available for this software at vbulletin.org, so if you see anything there that you like, let me know and I’ll see if I can install it on these forums.

2

I have completed the function that I’ll use to convert posts from the forum (that includes vbcode) to plain text that will be sent out to the newsgroup. It’s a major improvement over the old way, but i’d appreciate it if you’d try it out with some vbcode and if it outputs stuff incorrectly, please let me know what input you used. Thanks. The test page is at http://www.unicyclist.com/newgateway/vbparse.php

If you don’t know what vbcode is, check out http://www.unicyclist.com/forums/misc.php?action=bbcode

3

looks and feels good to me.