I have something to add to this discussion... something I never thought about until someone pointed it out. I have had this hack installed for at least a week and have never been able to get my posts out to Usenet. I just checked with my host and, sure enough, they have outgoing port 119 blocked! :ermm: To make matters worse, they refuse to open it up for my domain.

So, if anyone here is having problems with their posts not showing up, first thing I would do is check to see if your host is blocking outgoing port 119.

I'm screwed unless someone wants to code POP3 to NNTP or something to that effect. :ermm:

this sucks...

To those people who have this thing working, what hosts are you using? Mine is Lunarpages.

That won't help your situation, your web server needs to talk to a NNTP server on port 119 to send the news to it. pop3 to nntp is used to post news by email instead of vB.

If you can retrieve news but not post, that means the port is open. Does the news server accepts posts? or does the server accepts posts from your web server's IP range?

If you can ssh to your web server, just try to use one of the Unix news readers from the shell. eg. tin. You can even use lynx to read news. Check Google, I can't remember.:)

Open for incoming only! The server is firewalled and port 119 outgoing is blocked! From what the support staff has told me, there is no way in hell I am getting anything out 119... ever. This is their reply.

Some news providers will also let you run NNTP on other ports - like port 80. I'd contact my news provider.

At work the NNTP *protocol* is blocked :(

Good idea, Allan... I am going to look into it.

thanks!

Lierduh,
I'm glad to see you moving this project forward! I'm among the ones who have had your earlier version running for several weeks on my VB-3 forum and I am really looking forward to these updates, especially the admin section.

Thanks!

Lierduh,

Just got this up and running on a fresh install. Fantastic job. I've used the vb2 version for a year and this is a vast improvement. Particularly appreciated are the no-archive option and UU-encoded attachments (This now opens up all the binary groups which was too problematic with just mime encoded features). Control panel works great as well.

Two questions related to the attachments:

Is there a way of creating the thumbnails at the same time the the messages are downloaded? If you have the thumbnails option active, it shows the broken red x in the message. When you manually run the re-create thumbs option from the update counters menu it does create them, but it means re-creating the entire attachment table.

I can't get the attachments to work when using the 'attachments as files' option (this would be my preferred option with a vast number of attachments). the files download, but when you click the link on the post it can't find the file. When you reverse the process (i.e. switch back from files to db storage) the images reappear.

Thanks for a great upgrade.

Ok, so, for those who are following along with my connection "soap opera" woes, here's a bit of good news...

From Giganews...

I am dropping Newsguy just as soon as I get home. I asked them about port 80, but apparently I can only use 80 if I go with their $75.00/month blah blah plan. LOL! Um... NO THANKS!

For those who are having problems posting from VB to Usenet, take note, port 119 on your web server may be blocked for OUTGOING data.

I've been using this hack with Giganews for quite awhile. Works just fine :)

Take a look if you like - I've got one newsgroup set to autoprune every day so it only holds 90 days worth of posts, but it works just fine.

Forumhome is at http://ebassist.com/vb3

The only mod to the gateway I've made is to disable signatures in gateway.php - but we discussed that earlier in the thread :)

edit: Before you switch news providers it might be a good idea to see whether your ISP blocks only port 119 or the entire NNTP protocol. Telnetting to a news server won't tell you whether your ISP blocks NNTP, I'm afraid :(

Made the upgrades (including the added sql parts per Erwin, thanks) and the latest gateway hack is working just fine, I like the new interface in the admincp too.

Two questions;

1) Lierduh, when you talk about adding a 'new usenet posts' to the navbar, is that as part of the 'quick links' menu or is it a whole new button on the navbar? I need to add it to quicklinks because I have removed the other 'new posts' thing.

2) when Allan was talking about commenting out the entire signature routine in gateway.php, could someone show exactly what I need to comment out? I would definitely like to remove that part for now.

Thanks Lierduh!