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).

[Gilby]

Originally posted by mood
Now that you have put such a great gateway together, do you think you could add the feature to gate the messages to a mailing list?
THAT would be THE BEST!

Actually, I was thinking of doing something of that sort, although, I'm working on other projects at the moment and that may be a ways away. A lot of the code from this hack can be used for that. Maybe i'll take a look at it now and see if it's really easier than I expected.

[saab340]

I dont know what happened, but all my posts start with []

(Brackets in fromt of all the post that goes to the usenet)

It shows fine on my forum (Without the brackets)

Which line specifies the heading?

Only think I modified was the signature, and remove the > >> >>> stuff.

Thanks

Otherwise its working great

Help me out with this issue, since replies are generated in new threads.... Otherwise it would not matter.

This is my signature edit:

function sendnews($newthread, $isreply=false){
global $settings, $group, $prefix, $news, $DB_site, $msgid_date;
// get user's signature
if ($newthread[userid]){
$get_userinfo=$DB_site->query("SELECT signature,usertitle,customtitle FROM user WHERE userid=$newthread[userid] LIMIT 1");
$userinfo=$DB_site->fetch_array($get_userinfo);
// $signature = "\n--\n";
// $signature .= $newthread[username];
// if ($userinfo[customtitle]){ $signature .= " - $userinfo[usertitle]"; }
// if ($userinfo[signature]){
$signature .= "\n";
// $signature .= format_text($userinfo[signature]);
// }
$signature .= "\n http://www.test.com \n";
// $signature .= "$newthread[username]'s Profile: $settings[profileurl]$newthread[userid]\n";
$signature .= "View this thread: $settings[threadurl]$newthread[threadid]\n";
} else {
$userinfo = false;
// $signature = "\n--\n".$newthread[username]." - Unregistered User"; $signature .= "\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n";
$signature .= "View this thread: $settings[threadurl]$newthread[threadid]\n";
}



and this is to remove the >>> stuff

//$message[text] = preg_replace("/((\n[ ]*>[^\n]*)+)/","$1",$message[text]);
$message[text] = preg_replace("/((\n[ ]*>[^\n]*)+)/","",$message[text]);
//$message[text] = preg_replace("/((\n[ ]*>[ ]*>[^\n]*)+)/","$1",$message[text]);
//$message[text] = preg_replace("/((\n[ ]*>[ ]*>[ ]*>[^\n]*)+)/","$1",$message[text]);

$message[text] = preg_replace("/((\n[ ]*>[ ]*>[^\n]*)+)/","",$message[text]);
$message[text] = preg_replace("/((\n[ ]*>[ ]*>[ ]*>[^\n]*)+)/","",$message[text]);


Those are only changes I made, and now all my posts start with:[]

Any idea why?

[Gilby]

Are the brackets in the body or the subject?

[saab340]

subject

[Gilby]

Originally posted by saab340
subject

OK then, make sure that everything in the prefix column is set to NULL.

This SQL will do the trick:

UPDATE nntp_groups SET prefix = NULL

[nafae]

Ok so I think I did everything right, but then again I am not sure... Gilby can I get you to check out my server for me and check and see if you can tell what the problem is? I am sketchy at best with this sql stuff...

[Gilby]

Originally posted by nafae
Ok so I think I did everything right, but then again I am not sure... Gilby can I get you to check out my server for me and check and see if you can tell what the problem is? I am sketchy at best with this sql stuff...

What/Where do you want me to look at?

[saab340]

Also I just remembered, I changed the time to show correct time... ie not time when cron (ie when downloaded)

and I see that some of the posts which are replied... ie Re: something

will show in different posts. What is the cause of this? time issue?

Thanks (Gilby You are doing a great job)

this is the mod for time....
// if ($group[lastmsg] == 0){
$date = strtotime($message[date]);
//} else {
//$date = time();
//}

[nafae]

well, I installed it and set for alt.comp.programming 31 0 (usenet url) NULL NULL 1 under nntp-groups, then I run gateway.php, it downloads a file that sayes

1 group(s) gatewayed.
Logging in to (usenet).com, group alt.comp.programming

but when I check forum 31 (http://www.coderforums.net/forumdisp...?s=&forumid=31) nothing appears there...

[Gilby]

Originally posted by nafae
well, I installed it and set for alt.comp.programming 31 0 (usenet url) NULL NULL 1 under nntp-groups, then I run gateway.php, it downloads a file that sayes

1 group(s) gatewayed.
Logging in to (usenet).com, group alt.comp.programming

but when I check forum 31 (http://www.coderforums.net/forumdisp...?s=&forumid=31) nothing appears there...

Is the script running from the same network as your nntp server?