Module development and code questions

I'm planning to develop a usenet module right away. My specific needs are for a single newsgroup. Basically just offering my users a web interface to the newgroup to read/post. Not a big deal.

So I thought I'd come by here and think aloud..

I'm still pretty new to drupal, but had the following thought;

why do this as a module at all? I could just create a forum and populate its nodes/comments with a cron job from the newsgroup - it'd be a little more complicated; but basically:
have a table with all node / comment id's that were fetched from the newsgroup.
scan newsgroup hourly (or whatever) for new posts
cron job would also scan nodes in that forum that were posted via my site and post them to the newsgroup

good idea or bad idea? The alternative is a module which would bascially be independant of the drupal strucutre - but why reinvent the wheel?

Here's the one issue that comes to mind;
clearly I cannot expect everyone who posts to the newsgroup to also have an account on my site. So the posts / comments would have to be anonymous. I could append the posters name to the body itself. I'd prefer a solution of being able to have the authors name be the authors name even if there is no corelation to an existing user account.

am I making sense here? Basically allowing anonymous posts to have a given name (although I'm not to keen on permitting my users to do this site-wide).. I haven't dug in to see how difficult this would be, anyone done anything similar?

I'm currently developing a front page module which will display the latest story and forum post. However I have no experience retreiving nodes, let alone the latest ones. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-LankZ-

I'm building a family history site, and am investigating how to do a customization that would empower current authenticated users to grant authentication to new registrants. For instance, LiveJournal implements a version of this concept by alloting special registration "codes" to its users, which those users can dole out to friends. If someone registers without a referral code, they get the minimal level of access/features; whereas if they use a valid referral code at registration, they're immediately trusted with more access/features.

I have a knack for ideas, I was just looking at my Drupal page I finally just got all situated all nice and tidy, and started thinking "is there a module that will scan all current nodes and make links from words found in nodes to the node with the text in the title?". I found the glossary module, which allows me to manually add this and that, but I don't think there's an automatic one, if anyone knows if it's possible, I could most likely make it, that is if it were to be used, just a thought.

todo.module (adapted by univie)
This module is identical in structure and functionality with project.module (v 1.86 2003/06/25). I called it "todo" like a todo-list.
So the README-file of project.module refers also to todo.module.
I replaced some variables by new names and changed also the names of the tables.
Instead of "bug", "feature" and "task" as project type I use "task1", "task2" and "task3".
One can easily change the terms using the localization funtionality (translation) for more confortable and appropriate terms..

I initially got sold on PHP when I found PHP-Nuke v4.4. Then I found that upgrading caused headaches with the customizations I had done so I looked at writing modules for PostNuke. I know that I am only am amateur coder but creating a module should not be that painful. Thankfully, just in time, I found drupal. With the documentation the drupal folks provided I was able to create a semi-simple module in a day.

Now I am limping forward with converting my old PHP-Nuke v4.4 site customizations to drupal modules.