Hmmm... What is the lastmsg column set to in the database? It should be set to 0, but you can try setting it at 6.

I've had this hack working great for over a month now, but now I'm getting the following error:

"mysql error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query

mysql error number: 2013"

Has my host possibly changed something that is killing this script? Like I said, I have had this working for some time now and just started getting these error messages. Does mySQL have some sort of timeout setting?

Thanks!

I have been having the same problem when pulling in a big number of posts from the newsgroups. I wonder if this linked to PHP's max_execution_time? Is there anyway the post retrieval could be 'chunked' into distintinctive processes?

cool, gilby! thanks for all the tips.

if you need access to any of my news accounts, pm me. snews in particular has some insane retention on some groups. hopefully, the memory problems goes away when php or other components are updated. 4.1.2 IS known to be pretty buggy, and it doesn't look like anyone else is having any memory issues, per say.

and i'll definitely kick you some money next pay period! i hope everyone does.

well, i for one, DID need to increase php's max execution time. but i think mysql timeouts are something else entirely.

I changed my max_execution_time in /etc/php.ini to something crazy, like 6000 seconds. That's 6000 CPU seconds, though, so it's really overkill. If you look at CPU time with top for a really long process, you'll see cpu differs from real-time in a very large way.

Again, this shouldn't fix mysql timeouts. Message eva2000 and point him at this thread. He's the quicker picker upper for MySQL!

Hey, Gilby, got a question...

(heck, come to think of it, this may have been asked and answered before in the past 365 something messages -- i'm sorry if it has)

If someone is subscribed to a thread with email notification, do you know if importing messages is supposed to alert them? It seems like if users go to their CP panel, they'll sometimes see subscribed threads as being active, but they'll never actually be notified in any other way.

It'd be cool if they could be. While most users like Usenet via vB, some do say 'why not just use Google?'. The more normal vB options work for threads, forums, users, etc., the more edge you have over something like Google Groups. Google is so BASIC, while vB is more... amazing and far more usable on an everday basis. Especially with all the wonderful hacks!

Anyhoo -- next things I'm going to install are Community Bulletin Generator and some sort of Top 10 Active Threads hack. Maybe the syndicated content hack, I dunno.. Hopefully they work with usenet generated threads. I bet they will. A few other hacks I've installed work GREAT, I'll tell you that! The only one that has any weirdness is Quick Reply. I think it replies to the first message in a usenet thread, and not the last message. This confuses the normal usenet folks who are reading on a threaded basis.

Other than the weirdness with Quick Reply, and the non-updating of subscribed threads and forums... everything is quite fab vB integration wise. This is certainly a superior step up from using Google or your news reader!

Great hack. We had difficulty getting lynx to invoke gateway.php properly - it would return the forum main page, although we'd visited the site w/lynx to get cookied. Log files show an HTTP/1.0 request; viewing gateway.php with IE5 is an HTTP/1.1, and works fine... any ideas? I just wrote a windows app in the meantime with an embedded IE control on a cron.

Here's a wierd case - at Time1) user posts to vbulletin, and at Time2) gateway.php ships the msg to news server..then @Time3) the user edits the message. Does the new content ever get repropagated? My tests indicate not. Sorry if this is an FAQ, 'edit' is a lousy search term!
Jeff

It's supposed to, and it did when I first tested that feature after putting it in, however, I have begun to wonder if it's actually being sent out or not. It might not.

I don't understand your problem. If gateway.php is executed, then it'll import and export the newsgroup posts. However, with the added logging variable in the url that I have in the example, it will not output anything, unless there is a major error, in which case if this is a linux/unix setup, it'll send an email to the cronjob owner.
It does not repropogate it. The message may have replies and cancelling the message and reposting it would break the threads. What I do on my forums is set it up to have a low edit time and leave it at that.

it's pretty strange..gateway is at http://<host>.com/forums/gateway.php. When we use lynx to get the page (leaving off log=cron to keep things simple), the HTML shown belongs to the vBulletin main welcome page... the server log file shows a 200 code, with a big content length being sent back.
Gateway.php is set up, going and working just fine when we visit it with a normal web browser.
Ever seen this problem?

What are the dependencies. How do I edit the SQL Database? Are there any other questions as a newbie that I should ask?

Thanks

I do not know why that would be happening, unless you have your board turned off where only the admin can view the board. Another possibility is that you put the gateway.php in the admin folder instead, but I would guess you'd get other errors if you did that. Aside from those, it's probably some sort of rewrite thing that is defined in the server, such as it redirecting all host.com requests to www.host.com

The only dependancies are having vBulletin 2.2 and a connection to a newsgroup server or a pop email account.

The easiest way to edit the MySQL database is to use phpMyAdmin and just hit the browse button when in your forums database and upload the sql file. You can also do it at the command line. In future version, I will probably make it where the database will be automatically checked to see if it's set up and if not it'll load the defaults.

I may sounds like I complete idiot but I have no clue what this does O_O

This hack imports and exports posts to/from USENET and other newsgroups into your forums. It allows one to tap into existing discussions that are happening on usenet and making vBulletin live up to it's slogan "Instant Community." :)

I am guessing that you may not know what newsgroups are and that is why you do not know what this hack does. You may want to check out: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/what-is/part1/

Okay, when I installed the hack, everything went great, but when my users post, it only shows up on my forums, and not on the usenet topic.

For example, when I post something, the reply shows up on my forum, but when I use Outlook Express to view the newsgroup, it doesn't show up.

When I run my gateway.php file, this is what it outputs:Could somebody help me out?

Thanks,
Alex

Hi,

I am wondering if it would be possible to extend this hack in such a way that it can check which current vb threads have no NNTP counterpart anymore and that it would automically close the vb thread.

For some reason my gateway.php file was corrupted when uploaded.. Reuploaded and it is now working!

I've had this running on a previous webserver without any problems. But im now moving to a new server and when I go to run gateway.php I get this error message:

if ($calledby != "interface") { $ad = ""; header("Content-Type: text/plain"); include("global.php"); } else { $ad = "../"; $headers_sent=1; } // Load NNTP classes include($ad."nntp.php"); // POP3 class include($ad."class.POP3.php3"); //include("parser.php"); include($ad."mime.php");
Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/path/to/where/gateway.php on line 54

I've verified that all installation steps were covered correctly.

Any help is appreicated!

Sean

(The path is actually correct, just removed to security reasons)

Nice package. I have it working, but get these two warnings:

Warning: Failed opening 'class.POP3.php3' for inclusion ...
Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent ...

Just thought I'd post and ask what I should do ..

Thanks for the work.

Ps-Edit: Uploaded class.pop3.php3 to the forum directory (where mime.php et al were uploaded) and the problems cleared up. Note: file is included in package, but no reference to it are -- it is not listed as one of the files to upload.

After reading the 379 messages in this thread with great interest. I really want to install this. However i have a couple of questions to people that are already using it.

If i added say 2 newgroups. Each with a max of 1000 messages what sort of increase in server load would i see? (Bandwidth + space) I guess this is the only concern i have.

Thanks in advance

Phil

I installed this hack at www.tourc.com for automotive forums..... I love it...

I'm just in the process of mirroring all the automotive groups...
it takes a while to catch up with the groups the first few runs of newnews.pl, but is super quick after that... I noticed very little bandwidth increase at all!..... barley enough to measure.... in fact the full mirror (I'm about half done, but I've done some huge groups with 45,000 messages per group and more) of all the automotive groups around 150 or 200 groups will be about 500meg of bandwidth.... (half gig) thats not much, and the runs of newnews.pl after the first mirror take almost no bandwidth....

the biggest problem I encountered was that I had so many groups and messages my searchindex table started getting out of hand... It reached about a gig, and I was only a quarter done, so I killed all the records and set the nntp options to not index the groups that are based on newsgroups and only index local groups.... no that that is done, my whole dbase is arround 40 meg as of may 22, but should be around 80 or so when done!...

the only bandwidth increase I can really see after the initial mirror is done, is all the newsgroup visitors coming to my site! :)

excellent hack or whatever... thanx!

NOTE: if you want to test the hack you can at my site www.tourc.ca and use the following username and pass

username: testuser
password: testuser

enjoy!

I love this hack, It seems to take hardly anyspace or bandwidth on my server however i do have 1 small question.

I have 2 newsgroups in a private forum but it has added all the newsgroups to the post count. Is there anyway i can have these 2 forums taken off the post count????

Any ideas????

Phil
www.gamblingforums.net

I hardly think my small addition qualifies as a hack, as I wrote it in about 3 minutes; but here is a very simple way to have users post via the gateway via their regular email address, and not one put together from makeshift message-id.

In gateway.php, search for,

Replace it with,

In gateway.php, search for,

Replace it with,

- Mark

System Administrator Asarian-host.org

---
"If you were supposed to understand it,
we wouldn't call it code." - FedEx

Forgive my being stupid, but where it says "Go into your database and modify the settings in the nntp_settings table." I don't know what to do. I don't know crap about SQL, and our host decided to disable Telnet for us because it's "safer." :p

Oh, and i use phpMyAdmin.

If you use the graphical interface (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...threadid=36475) you don't need to know any sql...

Thanks for the hack. Only problem is I don't know how to find a usenet group's server. Also, I keep getting an error saying that thread.msgid does not exist.

It was working properly but now when I'd like to read a thread from a newsgroup, all users are displayed as if they were on my ignore list. What could cause such a problem?

I have been trying to get this hack to work for the last two days. I have read through every post in this thread, but could not find a solution. I have been using the admin interface supplied by GameCrash to setup newsgroug/forum details. I'm having the same problem that many people reported. Everything seems fine except that when I run gateway.php, I get nothing in the forum. After a few seconds I get the message:

The IE windows says Done, but nothing was copied into the forum.

I tried some of the debugging suggestions here, including the error reporting line in gateway.php and the last nntp.php debug version that Gilby posted. With those I get

I have no idea what this means. My situation is somewhat unique since I am trying to import a company internal newsgroup, so there is no other server I can try. I can view the newsgroup just fine using Outlook Express with no userid or password setting, so I don't think it is a permission issue. Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated.

I have been doing some more investigation and discovered that our internal news server is using something called NNTPCache (see www.nntpcache.org for more details). Could this cause problems for the NNTP hack?

I did a clean install of vBulletin 2.2.5 on a test system (PHP 4.2.0 and MySQL 3.23.49-nt). I installed NNTP hack 1.9 without installing the admin interface. I used phpMyAdmin to set it per the readme.txt files. Same problem. Everything seems OK, but no forum is ever created and no threads are imported.

One more piece of information that might help. I tried running gateway.php again with the debugging version of nntp.php that Gilby posted and showqueries=1. Here is the output (changed the server and group names since they are inside our firewall). The reponse from the server would seem to indicate that it's connecting, but IE says done in a few seconds and it never retrieves any posts. Any tips on how to debug this problem would be appreciated. I'm trying this on a test system, not my production vBulletin install, so I can try just about anything.

I don't know if anyone's listening. I think I have found the source of the problem, but don't know how to fix it. If I add an echo to line 86 of gateway.php (v1.9) as follows:

echo $max = $news->max();

I get the following message when I run it.
For some reason the funtion that is trying to determine the max post number is picking up the last part of the prompt returned by the news server login. I don't know PHP so can't figure out why this is happening. Any suggestions?

I put a test post into the forum and discovered that it will add a new post to the newsgroup, but it never downloads any threads probably due to the problem described above.

Well, I may not know PHP, but I was able to figure it out by using the echo command to see what was happening. The problem was the extremely long (151 chars) login response being returned by our news server. The fix is to edit line 75 in the nntp.php file:

$response = fgets($fp, 128);

and change the number to 256. After this change all the threads were downloaded.

OK, I spoke too soon. Got all the posts downloaded, but I am also seeing the "ignore list" problem. When I open a thread, every post says:

Did anyone every figure out what causes this problem? I am running vBulletin 2.2.5 like the others who reported it.

A search of the vBulleting community forum uncovered that the ignore list problem was fixed in version 2.2.6. It affected any post made by a userid which was not in the user table. Since the NNTP hack set the userid to zero for all imported posts, they were affected by this bug. If you have this problem try upgrading to v2.2.6.

I just upgraded vbulletin from 2.2.4 to 2.2.6 and now my usenet groups are not downloading??? I see it connects to usergroups, but nothing is downloaded. I am using little modded 1.8 version of nntp.

Thanks for help.

Turned the erro log on, and I am getting bunch of these:

Use of undefined constant lastmsg....
Use of undefined constant forum.....
Use of undefined constant flush....
Use of undefined constant prefix - assumed 'prefix' in <b>/home...

And also my host upgraded their PHP. so thats why I upgraded my vbulletin, it was giving some errors. php 4.2.1

<a href="http://www.joeygowdy.com/forum/gateway.php" target="_blank">http://www.joeygowdy.com/forum/gateway.php</a>

4 group(s) gatewayed.
Could not connect to NNTP-serverLogging in to .dixie-net.com, group alt.music.christian

Ive inputted all the usenet servers i want downloaded to my site... yet it still doesnt work... any thoughts ?

I don't konw if this has already been asked before, I could not find an answer: Does the php have to be compiled --with-imap in order for this hack to work?

So does anyone have any thoughts ?

Lovely - just found out my isp doesnt support usenet --

so does anyone know of any cheap servers that do ?