⚠️ NOTE: This project is no longer being maintained. Please feel free to fork it, clone it, make your own version of it, or whatever you wish.

NewsDesk (news.js)

by Craig Hendricks
[email protected]
telnet://conchaos.synchro.net
https://conchaos.synchro.net

Description:

A simple RSS feed viewer for Synchronet BBS, which lets users read the article text in the BBS terminal.

How it works:

It makes use of Synchronet's rss-atom.js library to access RSS feeds.

When a user selects an article to view, they can optionally be given the choice to read the text from the article, provided by a text-rendition of the article from FrogFind.com.

Instructions:

1. Extract the contents of the ZIP file to /sbbs/mods (or another path of your choosing; make sure you set the path properly in the next steps that follow).

2. Add to SCFG -> External Programs-> Online Programs (Doors):

   Name                  NewsDesk
   Internal Code         news
   Start-up Directory    ../xtrn/mods
   Command Line          ?news.js
   

3. If you want to show news feed during logon, add the following line to the end of your /mods/logon.js file (copy from /exec/logon.js if you haven't already done so):

   bbs.exec("?../mods/news.js");

Configuration and Customization:

Edit the included .msg file to your liking in PabloDraw.

Obviousy, everyone prefers different news sources. You can add or remove news sources in the news_src.json file. Each entry should be formatted as follows:

{
    "name": "\u0001rBBC News",
    "url": "http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml",
    "icon": "bbc",
    "frog_prompt": true
},

16 different sources come pre-configured. Up to 22 sources fit comfortably.

The file must be valid JSON. This means CTRL-A characters must be expressed as \u0001.

The icon should correspond to a .msg file in the newsicons directory.

Setting frog_prompt to true will prompt the user to view the full article text. Set this to false if there's enough info given in the RSS feed itself, or if the results from FrogFind aren't readable.

Other Notes

There's no way to know whether FrogFind.com is here to stay, or will always be free. If it ever changes or ceases to exist, this mod would no longer be able to fetch text-renditions of articles.