BOUNTY: Cash offered for usenet module.

Background

I like the idea of bounties and the recent bounties people have offered. They seem to be effective, so I though I would try to start one myself.

I am offering a bounty on the completion of a usenet module that meets the below specifications. My offering is $100 USD and I hope others will contribute financially as well in order to encourage a developer to undertake the task. If you are a developer and have begun developing this module, please comment here so we can avoid duplicating efforts.
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At one point, many months ago, I had a semi-working usenet module (far from complete, but it was a start) but have lost the code. My TODO list is always growing and I do not foresee having time to undertake this development myself.

Module Description

Seamlessly synchronize a specified forum with a specified newsgroup. This integration should be relatively transparent to users of the drupal site. If someone named ‘johnny’ posts to the newsgroup directly, users of the drupal site would see that post as being by an anonymous user named ‘johnny’, etc.

The admin user(s) should still be capable of deleting posts. When a post is deleted, any future replies to it would not be imported into the forum either.

Module Functionality

The module will ‘synchronize’ the specified forum(s) with the specified newsgroup(s) on a set interval by means of the _cron() hook. At this point, the module will push new forum postings by users of the drupal site to the news server(s) and pull new posts from the news server(s) to be imported into the forum(s).

Threading shall be maintained for posts originating from either source and combined. By this I mean that outgoing posts originating from the drupal site should contain all pertinent header information including the post ID it is in response to (if applicable).

For outgoing posts, the senders name and email address will be configurable (see admin options).

Optional text will be appended to outgoing posts. As an example, one may find it desirable to add text such as;

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Posted via drupal.org by username ‘mork’

Text quoting will be handled elegantly. Users of newsgroups and users of forums generally behave as polar opposites with respect to quoting. Forum users generally post without quoting any text unless absolutely necessary. Usenet posters generally quote text as a rule.

As a result, I foresee two ‘filters’, one for incoming posts and one for outgoing posts. The outgoing post filter should do the following;

• Look for the occurrence of quoted text (blockquote, cite, etc)
• If there is quoted text, no need to add any. Else, add quoted text (quote text of parent node/comment if it has a parent).
• Convert blockquote/cite/whatever into usenet style quoting (generally each line beginning with ‘>’).
• Strip all HTML from outgoing posts.

The incoming posts filter should do the following:

• Inspect quoted text and strip the ‘>’ characters from the beginning of the lines.
• Compare this quoted text to the posts parent
• If it is believed the quoted text has quoted the entire post (a default of many news readers when replying) then remove the quoted text.
• If it is believed the quoted text has been selectively quote and is sufficiently short (see admin config) then convert it to bloquote/cite/quote/whatever and let it remain in the post.

I envision some heavy use of regular expressions to elegantly accomplish the above.
Also note that many news readers add a line preceding their quoted text that does not begin with a ‘>’ character and we need to catch as many of these as possible (although they are endless in their incarnations). It may be something like;

On 05/06/2005, mork <…@...> said the following:

Configuration (Admin -> Settings -> Usenet)

1. There needs to be a way to specify a newsgroup for a specific forum. Here newsgroup would mean news server, port, username, password, newsgroup name. Each forum that is synchronized with a newsgroup need not be from the same news server.
2. Text to be appended to outgoing posts. Should have a variable (something like %username%) so something like the example described above is possible.
3. Name for ‘from’ field for outgoing posts. This should again permit the %username% variable.
4. Email address for ‘from’ field for outgoing posts.
5. Number of posts to retrieve. This is for the initial pull to prevent pulling everything the news server has to offer. Subsequent pulls should retrieve only new posts.
6. Checkbox option: enable ‘smart quoting’ on outgoing posts.
7. Checkbox option: enable ‘smart quoting’ on incoming posts.
8. Number of lines to be considered a long quote (for incoming posts, threshold to determine if quote should be stripped or not when importing).
9. # of minutes between synchronizing (assumed cron runs at least this often, but potentially more frequently).

Probably some other obvious options are needed that I missed out on.

Technical Details

I leave that up to you. The one requirement is that the module be self contained and require no modifications to core code. My approach included an additional table to keep track of some relationships and to tag what had been exported/what is new/etc. There's plenty of documentation and open source scripts for performing all of the communication and exchanging with the news server that you will find useful.

Note: it is ok to assume a one-to-one relationship (i.e. no need to allow multiple newsgroups to be synchronized with a single forum and vice-versa.)