I'm chipping away at my front-end todo list - at the top of the stack is group and message deletion. I searched through the novabbs archives, but couldn't find a complete answer for both of these:

- What are the steps for deleting a single message from RSL?
- A single thread and all of its replies?
- An entire group, and all of its messages?

I realize I'm asking for a lot here, but once I have the back-end steps down pat, I can start writing a front-end for users and administrators.

Thanks!
vga

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Posted on Rocksolid Light

vga256 wrote:

> I'm chipping away at my front-end todo list - at the top of the stack is group and message deletion. I searched through the novabbs archives, but couldn't find a complete answer for both of these:

> - What are the steps for deleting a single message from RSL?

See nocem.php for an example of deleting a particular message. This will delete from the group's article database, the overview and, using 'function thread_cache_removearticle' from thread.inc.php, immediately from newsportal (so it doesn't show up in the web interface for a short time.

Basically, you need to remove from <group>-articles.db3, articles-overview.db3, and from newsportal specific cache (thread_cache_remove_article). This is shown in nocem.php.

> - A single thread and all of its replies?

There is currently no feature to delete an entire thread. You would need to make a list of all the articles in a thread, and delete them individually.

> - An entire group, and all of its messages?

Remove the group from $config_dir/<section>/groups.txt.

This will only remove the group from operating (polling and displaying), but will not remove the database. Use 'import-db3.php -remove' to do that.

> I realize I'm asking for a lot here, but once I have the back-end steps down pat, I can start writing a front-end for users and administrators.

Looking forward to your new features!

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Retro Guy

Woohoo - thank you for the detailed answer - that's perfect. Am starting to work on the front-end implementation now.

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Posted on Rocksolid Light

oof - took two days of guessing and testing, but I finally got it all working.

Just to caution anyone beforehand: this commit is NOT safe to just dump into a live RSL install. I have not added any kinds of user or administrator permissions, so anyone that is $logged_in could/will wipe your entire message database for giggles.

Over the next few days I will be sketching out an administrator/moderator/user permissions system, which will allow you to set your own permissions for each kind of deletion.

But for now, having deletion available is at least a step towards more user/admin-friendly board management:

* Message deletion is now exposed in the web interface.

* Group deletion is now exposed in the web interface.

The most important parts of the commit involve new/existing functions for message and group deletion:

admin.php accepts $_POST['command'] == "delete_group" and "delete_message"
It validates whether the group and/or message exists before performing a deletion.

To delete a message, it calls: rslight/scripts/lib/delete.inc.php has delete_message($messageid, $group)

To delete a group, it calls: rslight/scripts/lib/delete.inc.php has delete_group($group).
then it calls remove_articles($group) and reset_group($groupname, 1) for a complete wipe of the group. Afterwards, it calls reload_groups() from newsportal so the group list is reloaded by the NNTP server.

I hope this helps clarify the commit. Normally I don't dump a massive commit like this, but it required a lot of changes all over the place. (And it's also worth noting that tomo-rslight IS a fork. I try to keep most of the core functionality the same as RSL, but I am refactoring pathnames/functions and changing variable names as I go.)

https://github.com/vga-256/tomo-rslight/commit/1e18c88299ec7c2cdfa782de9c92f0b7cc397ad2

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Posted on Rocksolid Light

vga256 wrote:

> oof - took two days of guessing and testing, but I finally got it all working.

Nice! Looking forward to one day see an instance online.

> * Message deletion is now exposed in the web interface.

> * Group deletion is now exposed in the web interface.

Great work. These are nice features considering your goal.

> I hope this helps clarify the commit. Normally I don't dump a massive commit like this, but it required a lot of changes all over the place. (And it's also worth noting that tomo-rslight IS a fork. I try to keep most of the core functionality the same as RSL, but I am refactoring pathnames/functions and changing variable names as I go.)

"tomo-rslight IS a fork" Good point. As of now, our commits have diverged toward our own goals.

I'm very pleased to see a well written fork. Options for projects are great!

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Retro Guy

> "tomo-rslight IS a fork" Good point. As of now, our commits have diverged toward our own goals.

> I'm very pleased to see a well written fork. Options for projects are great!

Hopefully some of these features might be useful to other RSL nodes in the future. Right now I'm just aiming at building out core functionality, and worrying about making it perfect later, as I tend to usually overengineer stuff. While I'm doing some refactoring along the way, I do want to keep it "RSL-core" compatible... meaning that an RSL peer would have 100% sync-compatibility with Tomo peers.

I wish I could have kept the scripts identical to make up/downstream PRs easier to merge, but ah well! I really appreciate how straightforward your code is - I'm able to muddle my way through with the PHP docs :)

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Posted on Rocksolid Light

vga256 wrote:

>I do want to keep it "RSL-core" compatible... meaning that an RSL peer would have 100% sync-compatibility with Tomo peers.

This should not be a problem. I wrote the NNTP (nnrpd) commands to match the RFC as best I could.

Unless you change something there, both forks should easily peer with eachother, and with inn2 servers.

> I wish I could have kept the scripts identical to make up/downstream PRs easier to merge, but ah well! I really appreciate how straightforward your code is - I'm able to muddle my way through with the PHP docs :)

Glad to hear my code is readable :) Sometimes I think it's a mess, lol!

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Retro Guy

Retro Guy wrote:

> vga256 wrote:

>>I do want to keep it "RSL-core" compatible... meaning that an RSL peer would have 100% sync-compatibility with Tomo peers.

> This should not be a problem. I wrote the NNTP (nnrpd) commands to match the RFC as best I could.

> Unless you change something there, both forks should easily peer with eachother, and with inn2 servers.

I should be more specific here.

rslight-lib.php hold the commands for the running nntp server. So, if you enter 'XOVER 900-950' to the rslight nntp server, that command is processed here. You shouldn't break nntp compatibility of the nntp server unless you change the command functions in this file.

You can also add commands to this file without breaking it. I do plan to add some commands in the future here, but it should not affect existing commands at all.

spoolnews.php is where the rslight nntp client runs. It connects to an nntp server, and expects standard replies to standard commands. It currently works fine with several tested remote nntp servers.

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Retro Guy

Yup, I noticed that the bulk of the NNTP work was being doing in rslight-lib. I'm going to keep all of the existing NNTP commands exactly the same, and potentially in the future add more RFC*-compliant commands as necessary. (So far, I haven't had a reason to).

I'm also going to preserve the custom X-Headers that RSL uses, as those are really useful. I will probably add color Face support in the future.

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Posted on Rocksolid Light

vga256 wrote:

> I'm also going to preserve the custom X-Headers that RSL uses, as those are really useful. I will probably add color Face support in the future.

Does macos provide 'compface'? I could not find that freebsd does, so xface doesn't seem to work on those servers.

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Retro Guy

Ah, I didn't realize that was the command name. macOS doesn't include it by default, but it is easily installable via macports/homebrew. I'll add a note to try that out.

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Posted on Rocksolid Light