“Please can you remove my email address”
This is the most common request I get. I have decided to remove from display all email addresses from all newsgroup posts (along similar lines to Google Groups) in an effort to stop the email spam harvesters.
The message headers (and the email address of the sender) are still viewable, but are hidden behind a ‘captcha’ screen (one of those ‘copy the letters in the box below’ devices). They appear to be quite effective at determining man from machine.
I also intend to introduce a ‘view raw post’ feature, again behind captcha, where email addresses in the body of posts can be safely viewed.
In the last post I talked about the abilty to decode binaries. For the record, I will not be mirroring any porn, mp3, movie or warez newsgroups (and yes, there ARE some binary newsgroups other than these).I’ll leave those to the specialists 
I have been busy updating the web interface to the newsgroups that I mirror. Most of the work is in the back end, so you won’t see much difference - except of course it will run that little bit smoother One area that I have concentrated on is binaries. The scripts can now successfully decode uuenoded, yenc and mime binary formats. This took me much longer than it should have, as there was a damned bug that was distorting the images which took forever for me to track down. I expect to add some binary groups to the non-binary forums in the near future..
This project is about creating a better web interface to Usenet groups. The place I decided to start was to look at forum software which has a much more developed feel and look when comparing with existing Usenet web interfaces, and then look at building a fully featured Usenet interface on top of that.This left me with two options, vBulletin and phpBB, both of which are very developed and capable forum applications, and both already have hacks available to interface with newsgroups.In the end I opted for vBulletin as the core of the interface, as I felt its development is very active, has the most advanced features of any forum and a great api for developing and extending the software. It also has a very enthusiastic following with many hacks available at vBulletin.org and a pretty stable newsgroup hack.
The downside is it costs for each licence, and I will need a lot of licences.
One of the principles is to bring similar usenet newsgroups together into one collection, as opposed to one site for ten thousand different newsgroups. e.g. bring together all the Chess related groups into one site, such as ChessBanter. This can then focus on just this aspect along the idea that if you use or are interested in one of the chess groups, there is a fair chance the other groups might work for you as well.
This will give me a core platform on which to build, and I have already made significant progress on improving the interface and adding new features and I will talk about these more in the coming weeks and months.
This will be the home of NewgroupBanter where I will be sharing my thoughts, hopes and actions of the network of websites that I operate that make up NewsgroupBanter.