Module development and code questions

I thought I finally found a great host for my Drupal powered site, but was severly dissapointed when I discovered that the php configuration settings chould NOT be changed in any way. I've searched the Drupal site high and low for a fix for this, but have been unsuccessful. Yesterday I finally discovered a fix for this, so for everyone out there avoiding using quotes in their posts or those who have abandoned Drupal becuase of annoying backslashes - this should fix it for you. I created a function like this:

Hi,
there is a fatal error in module online.

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare throttle_status() (previously declared in C:\www\drupal-cvs\modules\online.module:170) in C:\www\drupal-cvs\modules\statistics.module on line 847

Also: http://drupal.org/node/view/1957

I am using Drupal 4.2.0 RC and module online 4.2.0 (cvs version has problem too).

Mirek
P.S.: Which version of this module is using on drupal.org site. :-)

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.