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Linking to UseNet

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Linking to UseNet
Forgive me if this has been covered before, but I searched the forums and was unable to find anything.

Is there anything special that needs to be done with Link SQL in order to link to newsgroups on UseNet? Can it be done? We enter the newsgroup in the URL field as news:news.newsgroup.topic format, but we get Page Cannot be Displayed errors. I assume this has something to do with the link actually using the Jump.cgi?ID#.

Any help would be appreciated.
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Re: Linking to UseNet In reply to
It might have to do with how jump cgi interprets a URL without an HTTP://

You might need to do something like:

if ($goto =~ /^news/ ) {
$goto ? print $in->redirect ($goto) : &error ("Record not found: $id");
}


So that it doesn't try to append another http:// to the file.

This would be above the "No go to links" line near the end of the file.

Let me know if that works, if not, tell me what your jump-to link url looks like -- it's probably going to be something like http://news:... but if I know what it is, it's easier to figure out what's going on.

I don't use the news feature, since a lot of people don't have a news reader set -- I am a "power user" and I don't.... I have a separate reader for news, and don't use netscape or MSIE for that... it bugs me... I'd rather get the error message, and switch over .... But the point is that you should _probably_ link to a detailed page that has the go-to news url on it, so people can copy or go to the link in a different program -- or not go.

If you are specificially setting up a newsgroups section .. it's probably not needed, but I know I hate when I hit a link and find it to be a newsgroup jump...




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Re: Linking to UseNet In reply to
Pugdog,

Please, please, please forgive my ignorance here. I can find my way around SQL, I know a little bit about OO programming, but I know next to nothing about Perl. I have a book that I'm trying to go through, but... in any case:

First of all, I tried inserting the code that you suggested. I inserted it in the sub main {} block under the "# Now let's send the user to the url.." section (I'm assuming that's where you were referring to) with the following code:

# Now let's send the user to the url..
if ($goto =~ /^news/ ) {
$goto ? print $in->redirect ($goto) : &error ("Record not found: $id");
}

else {

($goto =~ m,^http://,) or ($goto = "http://$goto");
$goto ? print $in->redirect ($goto) : return &error ("Record not found: $id");
}

When I use this, all my links (UseNet or HTTP) give me a Access Forbidden 403 error.

As far as what the jump to link looks like, is there somewhere besides the browser's address bar where I find this? The address bar and the html source both say

http://www.animejunction.com/links/jump.cgi?ID=#

Once again, excuse my ignorance here. As I've stated in a previous post, this whole thing was thrown onto me with no background whatsoever. I know that I'm able to learn it all, but at the moment I honestly feel like I'm part of a LinkSQL clique where so much of what I don't yet know is assumed knowledge. This is no offense to anyone here, just how it feels. I'm doing my best to look through all of the online resources to find my answers, but it doesn't always work.

Thanks for your help!
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Re: Linking to UseNet In reply to
To help debug, try putting:

print $in->header(), "<pre>";

just before the if else block. That way you can see what is being displayed.

Cheers,

Alex
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Re: Linking to UseNet In reply to
Was there ever a solution to this?

I am having a similar problem with links 2.0 and I was hoping that maybe a solution would be similar.