NNTP Gateway (Usenet/Newsgroups)

This hack provides a gateway to any NNTP newsgroup such as those from Usenet and other newsgroup servers. Selected newsgroups are imported from your news server and post on the forum are sent out to the newsgroup. This hack was greatly inspired by fastforward's usenet gateway hack. This one is a complete rewrite of that hack written in PHP and works with vB 2.2.2.

Installation:
Installation is pretty simple. No modifications to the vB php files are needed and it simply consists of dropping in the files to your forums directory, running the SQL modifications, and modifying the newsgroup settings for your desired newsgroups. For the complete installation details, read the readme.txt file.

Here are some of the features:

• Real cool vbcode to text conversion!
• All posts are inserted, even if parent thread cannot be found for replies
• Guests posts also get sent to the newsgroup.
• Importing of attachments from the newsgroup
• Poll info sent to newsgroup
• Attachment link sent to newsgroup
• Supports unlimited newsgroups and servers.
• email notification of new replies, just like regular forum posts
• Can import HTML messages and convert to limited vb code.

For control panel integration, please check out GameCrash's Graphical Interface addition.

What's not in it that was in fastforward's usenet gateway hack:

• No control panel integration at the moment. (Available separately)
• Does not support separate footers
• Does not allow custom email address to be used via the users option
• No spam control or string replacement support.
• No purging or autoexpire.

There is still lots that I'd like to add to it, but this is competely functional for basic newsgroup gateway support. It is most likely not free of bugs. If you have questions, suggestions or annoyances, please post in this thread.

vb3 support
lierduh modified this to provide support for the beta versions of vb3. When the release candidates of vb3 come out, I plan to add support for vb3 and add other features to this hack. If you have suggestions for new features, let me know.

E-mail gateway support
New in this version, you can now gateway with an email list. This will fetch emails from a POP email account and send via php's mail function to the mailing list's email address. To set up the list, in the newsgroup field, enter in the email address to send outgoing posts to. In the server field, enter in the pop3 server, and in the username and password fields enter in, you guessed it, the username and password to your pop account. Note: the email gateway capabilities has not been fully tested, so it might not work with your POP server. Also, it does not work in combo with a news<->forum gateway in the same forum (you can use either kind though in differnet forums within your forums).

[morrow]

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

Thanks

[Gilby]

Originally posted by winkler1


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?

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

[Gilby]

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

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.

[Neo]

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

[Gilby]

Originally posted by neo
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/

[eiSecure]

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:

2 group(s) gatewayed.
Logging in to newscache2.freenet.de, group alt.computer.security
Posting Message from Alex: 500 What?
Posting Message from Alex: 500 What?
Posting Message from chenko: 500 What?
Posting Message from chenko: 500 What?
Posting Message from Alex: 500 What?
Logging in to newscache2.freenet.de, group alt.comp.software
Posting Message from Alex: 500 What?
Posting Message from chenko: 500 What?
Posting Message from chenko: 500 What?

Could somebody help me out?

Thanks,
Alex

[patvdv]

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.

[SeanM]

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)

[leeherron]

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.

[freeshares1]

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