Awesome! I'll be happy to test it :)

Is there anyway to install this so that we can use both the newsgroup and mailing list features? I currently have 2 seperate boards for this and want to merge them both into my VB.

Thanks!

-Jason

Finally finished it, this got more involved than I originally thought :ermm: , I have tested it on my test forum and it's all working. It needs some real life testing now with someone using mailing lists - thank you BustaCap.

It works pretty much as I described it few posts back:

It searches by references first, if it can't find one or there isn't a match it checks if there is at least one "Re: " in the subject line, which gives us a fair idea that it should belong to an existing thread.

It then will search the subject titles of the existing threads, and if there is a match, select the most recent one and insert it the post into it.

If there is no match, it creates a new thread as normal.

* I have removed the attachment pending a bug removal *

I'm going to try this right now :D

.... waits nervously ....

Do you mean seperate forums (or sub-forums) within the same board? I'm fairly sure it does this now as standard.

It breezed through the first 10 messages, threading them correctly. Then it choked on the 11th message and gave me a SQL error. I pm'd you the error and some further info.

I ran great for me the first few times, however the messages going out to YAHOOGROUPS are now getting a SQL error.

This is the error I am getting...

Now gateway.php is running in the backround, and its not stopping. I want to reupload my old gateway.php

How do I stop the old gateway.php from running?

OK, I'll have a look at this tonight.

If it's a UNIX or Linux box use top to determine the process ID then kill the process with kill -9 process_id - if it's a Windows machine you can use Task Mangler to kill the task.

When I run the Gateway.php file via telnet I keep getting this error-


It has run a few times but it fails, is there something I should check?

Thanks again for all the work,

-Jason

How do you run gateway.php? by a lynx session or your php is running as cgi?
If your php is running as cgi, what version? I remember reading somewhere about problems with php running as cgi. The newer version of php fixes that.

Also check your web error log.

I have the latest PHP and its not running as CGI for sure. I have tried both, via telnet and with the browser. I didnt want to put it into cron until I got the messages downloaded for the first time.

If I run it via shell it will tell me about the segmentation error, if I run it via the browser it just says that its getting message # 231456 and then quits.

Thanks again for all of the help!!!!!!

-Jason

P.s. Great hack!

segmentation error is memory related. If you can control php.ini, check the memory_limit setting. The default is 8MB. vB3 often gives error with 8MB. Up it to 16 is a must for vB3. It is also possible the #231456 message has a large attachment.

You can always manually change the lastmsgid in the control panel to be higher than 231456, so that it will bypass this article and only get the aritcles with higher message id.

Thanks! It was that message I think. I had it skip that one and now it is working.

Thanks!!!!!

-Jason

Looking at the header of my outgoing messages, I see that my email address is being scrambled by adding several characters to the end of my name (eg, BustaCap.17laj@site.com). Also, the domain is wrong too (as per the "email address domain in the NNTP Gateway settings). This is great for posts going to newsgroups, but it is preventing me from sending posts to email lists that require a confirmed email address.

Would it be possible to keep the option of scrambling the email address for posts going to newsgroups but allowing for propper email addresses to go out to email lists? If both options aren't possible, perhaps just the ability to have a proper email address go out.

Thanks,
BC

First of all I?ve gotta say, thank you.
The hack is running without any problems and the installation went like a charme. So far, so good..

But now I?ve got some serious problems with other things. I?m living and running my site here in germany and the newsgroups we want to im- and export the postings to/from need correct headers so that outgoing postings to ng?s are available on the newsserver. These are restrictions we simply have to obey.

What am I asking for ?
By now the headers of forum to newsserver-postings are loking like this:

To have our postings showing up in our target newsgroup we are forced to complete the headers with the statements:

Quote:

Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

so that endusers and checkbots read the complete header similiar like this one:
Would be very important for us (and 2000+ others on our site) that someone could write this into this hack or could show us, how to fix that problem in another way. Has anyone an idea?

Regards & TIA,
Marv.

Has anyone seriously given more thought to the Filter idea? I would love to get that on my site since I primarily want the military realted newsgroups but not all the anti-bush spam that ruins them.

Thanks alot for the hard work,

-Jason

It is simple to fetch the real email address from the user table, but remember every forum user can post yet unlikely everyone of them have subscribed to the list. You naturally do not want other people to post under your email address to the list.

Find $newthread['postdateline']).

Insert these lines after that:

"\r\nMime-Version: 1.0\r\n" .
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\r\n" .
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit" .

should work although not tested. I must say it is quite strange that you need to have these to be able to post to the ng.

Here are two more mini-hacks which some may find useful. Thanks to BustaCap for testing the threading-by-subject script and to trackpads for testing the killfile filter.

Threading by Subject Title
The threading by subject script works on email lists only, whereby sometimes there are no message references included in the headers, so the only way to match the thread is by the subject title. Now with bugs removed :mad:

Killfile Filter to block posts
The killfile is similar to the equivilent you would find on a newsreader. It allows the admin to block certain messages from downloading if certain words or phrases are met by checking the posters name, subject title, email address or server where they originated. It is a fairly lightweight filter suitable for blocking annoying trolls and needs to used carefully to avoid blocking legitimate posts. Some may find this against the principles of usenet, but it's here if you want it.

You can use either or both of these together and are compatible with the stripping of email footers.

Does the threading for Mailing lists work correctly now? I installed it the other day and it worked a few times, and then I started getting mysql errors (posted above in this thread)

Also please explain how to set it up to strip document footers. On yahoogroups I would like to keep the ads (I would feel guilty stipping those out) however I would like to remove the instructions on how to unsubscribe to the Yahoogroup that is on the bottom of each message.

Thanks

Yes, problem solved ;)

The strip-footers script can be found here You enter the characters or words that start the area you want stripped - just enough for it to be unique, and from that point on the rest of the message will be stripped.

Thanks lierduh,
that worked for me.

We?re connecting to a non-public newsgroup on a buiseness-server, so we?re forced to do this modifications in the header. In german newsgroups you?ld find thousands of people yelling at you if you would participate a newsgroup with Outlook or OutlookExpress. They don?t even call those products "newsreader", they call it "data garbage centrifuge" because of the amount of bugs they are producing while trying to convert header-lines in a proper manner).
Most ng-members are using special news-readers like forte agent and others. These software pieces are producing correct headers but can?t read the one?s Outlook is inserting there.

lierduh, one problem remains.
In Germany they use letters like "?" "?" and "?" (and in capitols also of course). Is there anybody out there who could write some code which would convert these special german letters and other signs into ASCII on the server and in the moment gateway.php is sending the mesages out to the newsgroups ? (for outgoing posts to the newsserver & for incoming)

German letters:
? to &#196
? to &#228
? to &#214
? to &#246
? to &#220
? to &#252
? to &#223

Signs:
< to &#60
> to &#62
? to &#167
? to &#169
? to &#174
& to &#38
? to &#183
" to &#43
&#160 (Space)


We would really appreciate if someone could do this.. Any chance..? :ermm:

Great, Kevin - that?s another thing I was looking for. Thanks ! You read my mind :)

Could you add the body of a message as fifth element ? Some (including me) could find that very useful.

lierduh,

i noticed that the hack?s only fetching posts (sending them to a newsserver) which are answers. postings which are opening up a new thread aren?t included and they never show up in a newsgroup.

Can anyone confirm that for his/her site ?

I just tested this and my new thread showed up in the newsgroup.

When I first installed this hack I was using the vB cron for running the gateway, with the gateway.php supposed to be run every hour. However, I found that it was only running several times a day for some reason. When I used this method posts would often not show up. To trouble shoot I manually ran gateway.php immediately after posting and I found that all of those posts would be sent. I now use my site cpanel to run the cron job every 10 minutes and all posts show up. Try posting a new thread and then manually run gateway.php and see if that works.

Hello BustaCap, thanks for your suggestion - but that?s exactly what I already did before I?d posted my question here. I have no glue why starting posts aren?t send to the newsservers. (It?s definitifly the hack itself - the postings just don?t seem to be in my forum when I run gateway.php..)

And even worse - I can?t run cron jobs in my hosting package :ermm:
Any ideas? (beside upgrading the hosting-package..)

A bit confused there. As soon as you post a new thread, the thread should be in your forums. That is nothing to do with the gateway. Or unless you meant: you posted a new thread, but the gateway script did not send it to the server, or the server did not accept your new thread post. In any case, you might like to run it manually, capture the screen print out and post here for fault finding purpose.

GREAT work!!!!!!!

I have a problem and I am sure I am doing something wrong. I have many different mailing lists that go to my list email box. I have been trying to set up the script to take each list and put it into seperate forums. For example-

List A to Forum A
List B to Forum B etc etc

The problem is that no matter what I put in the settings in the newsgroup/mlist settings it still tells me that it sucessfully connected to the pop3 server and retrieved 0 messages. I also went in and looked are there over 60 messages in the inbox of that account.

Thanks again for the help,

-Jason

Are you sure that your email client isn't set to delete the messages from the server once it downloads them?

good morning, lierduh.

sorry - that?s what I should have done with the last post already.

Directly after submitting a new thread to the forums I manually run gateway.php without clicking anywhere else and it says:

Quote:

Connecting to server, server says: 200 The server welcomes infong64.xxx.de (2xx.xxx.xxx.xxx). Authorization required for reading and posting. Server responded after user name: 381 PASS required Server responded after password: 281 Authentication accepted. (UID=238408) Info for

nothing more...that?s it.
If someones posting now a new answer to that post gateway.php works as it should, but is only sending the answer to the newsserver - not the starting post. so it?s a bit confusing for the newsgroup when answers appear but the starting post is missing..
And of course - the post shows up in my forums but gateway.php just doesn?t seem to recognize that.

If it?s not to impudent, lierduh, would you mind to have a look in my forums by yourself? In that case I would send you the logins for .htaccess and the forum via PM. (erm...and before you ask - the problem remains with and without .htaccess enabled ;) )
Guess it?s easier to make a troubleshooting when you?re on the deck and can see the script in action. Just a suggestion.

And by the way.. - I really appreciate the work you?ve done to this hack. Thanks for the given support - must be hard to handle all the little problems that endusers like me are coming up with..:nervous:

No, I was using the webmail and I just rechecked, they are still on there.

Thanks again!

-Jason

how can i deactivate the attachment import from the script?

does it work, if i comment the following line??:
if ($message['attachments']) {
// process_attachments($date, $postid, $threadid);
}

This would be very helpful. At a minimum it would allow at least me to post to the group via the forum.

The way I would have this particular forum setup would be to first deny posting permission to all board members and then give permission only to those members who are already members of the email group I am mirroring. However, I would only do this if the messages look like they are coming from the sender and not from me. For this type of scenario I wouldn't care if my group members posted to the group using my email address as long as the individual posts showed up with their name in the From field.

For some reason, I set up about 15 groups for 15 different mailing lists but the program imports them into the wrong groups. For example out of the 15 it imported them all into just 2 of the groups.

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Thanks again for the help!

-Jason

Are you using the same Pop3 mail box? The current version requires a separate email for each mailing list.

There is no clear solution to this. For the lists that need confirmed email address, the individual users need to subscribe to the list. Once they are subscribed, there is very little benefit for them to post through the forum instead of just shoot an email directly to the list. It will also look odd for the rest of the list members to see an "email" sent to the list is actually coming from a forum.

1)Open list, anyone can post to it, even someone is not subscribed. This is the best way to use this script.

2)Closed list. There isn't a good clear solution. Even if you offer your master email address as the posting email address with other user's forum user name. It will not be a good picture to be honest. It is kind of cheating, and unrespectful to the list owner, since the list is a close list. I really need to think again about how to handle this.:) One thing a forum ower does not want to have is to have the list members hating your forums. The same goes for newsgroups.

As you have found out. That is correct.:)