NNTP Gateway for Usenet ( Newsgroups ), Mailing Lists

The latest version: V2.3.2 (31 Oct 2004)

What is it?

This hack provides a gateway from vBulletin forums to the USENET. It allows forum members to read newsgroup messages as well as to send posts to the newsgroups. In a nutshell, it turns vBulletin forums into a basic function news reader.

For an added bonus, this package also supports mailing list archive and forum to mailing list gateway. The software retrieves messages from a pop3 account and import them into the forums threaded. It also allows a forums user to send messages to the mailing list by the forum posting interface.

Why?

The gateway will be appreciated by forum members who do not know how to set up a news reader, or people who do not have port 119 open in their network. A forum interface to read and post news are often considered to be better than a news reader.

The gateway adds more contents to your forums and allows the members to interact with wider audience. It is common to see new users signing up to use this feature.

History

This hack is basically a hacked vB2 NNTP gateway written by Gilby to work with vB3. The original hack can be found here:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...7&page=1&pp=15


Features

Some of the features and improvement include:

• Handles both newsgroup posts and mailing lists.
• Handles MIME encoded messages and attachment.
• Handles UUEncoded messages.
• Two Admin Control Panels for all settings.
• Automated installation.
• Correct thread implementation. All imported messages and posts sent to newsgroups will be threaded correctly according to References and Message-ID headers.
• Optional setting to thread by subject for mailing lists that strip references header.
• Supports TABLE_PREFIX.
• Imported messages will be searchable just like normal forum posts.
• Similar threads are built when the messages are imported if the system setting is on.
• Multiple attachments importing.
• Save attachment to database or file according to vB setting.
• Thumbnail created while importing image files.
• Multiple attachment post to newsgroup is also supported.
• Selectable X-No-Archive header honouring system.
• Light on system resources.
• Global Killfile to filter out unwanted messages. Killfiles can have OR and AND effectiveness.
• Strip footer by setting for incoming messages. Strips out repeated message footers.
• Built options to disable signatures and footers for out going messages.

Future development

• AdminCP interfaces. (completed)
• Installation/upgrade script. (completed, coded into AdminCP)
• Traditional "> " lead posting interface.

What do you need and do not need?

You do not need to edit vB php files if you use two bookmarks
You need to edit one vB php file to insert two lines of code if you want direct click links within AdminCP.
No need to run SQL.

Installation

Basically the AdminCP interfaces take care of installation as well as upgrade in the background. Back up your database first. The scripts can modify your database without alerting you!

Please follow the instructions in the readme.txt file for more details.

Support

Please post your support questions to this thread. Please check the FAQ in the third post within this thread first.

================== UPDATES ======================
Jul 31 2004 (release version 2.2.0)

• Provided option of not importing attachments
• Provided option of pause between messages
• Provided option of not sending messages to USENET
• Provided mechanism to skip importing a message if it was crashed on it
• Provided "Default Footer" option
• Provided strip_footer function for mailing lists
  (written originally by KevinM)
• Provided Killfile functions with Header/Body/AND/OR settings
• Provided ability to thread messages by subject for mailing lists
• Provided ability to use a single POP3 account for different mailing lists
  (use prefix)
• Merged KevinM's attachment routine, save thumbnail to hard drive
  as vB3.0.3
• Official support to have the script run by Scheduled Tasks
• Many bug fixes

Please note, when you manually run the script, you must turn on the debug mode. Otherwise nothing will be displayed on the screen.

To run as debug mode: http://forums.yourdomain.com/gateway.php?debug=1

25 Oct 2004

• Provided the option of sending posts using the real email address
• Provided the option of sending posts using a fixed email address for
  each group.
• Posts are now held back if they are in the moderating queue
• Scheduled task log is now working
• Provided the option of sending the debug messages to the vB3 cron log
• Bug fixes

31 Oct 2004

Fixed bugs running the gateway by the vB3 Scheduled Tasks

1 March 2004

Uploaded the new zip file. It contains one or two bug fixes.

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by john_rsd

Dear lierduh



I have 2.2.0 but thread by subject does not seem to work. Very strange

Have you set the option in AdminCP to 1? A message must have "Re: " in the beginning of the subject before it can be threaded.

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by xb_

heh. i'm not sure, my only guess would be that vbulletin has reorganized the including of files in 3.0.3. However because of your reply i decided to give it another go with the newer version. Which didn't give me a session error, but it did give me a prefix error
That seems to be a problem around line nr 1050; one space too much. After i've removed that space it started importing.

Still i was left with two messages:
Both seem to be related with a certain template array.
It appears to work alright tho, besides those messages. yet i'm crossing my fingers for attachements.

Thanks for that, there was an extra space in that line.

Usually Warnings do not affect php scripts. Strange I am not getting any warnings, even in the error log. Have you had other hacks done involves templates?

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by john_rsd

http://proteluser.com/bbs3/showthread.php?t=2074

It now looked like this
We looked at this before but now i can replicate it as it was me who sent the message and replied to it. All messages were sent from outlook2003 in plain text format.

I have found the reason for this:


A third thing that can cause "messy" email is the fact that some older mail programs do not gracefully handle the advanced character sets that let us use "special characters" such as bullet marks, foreign letters, and other non-standard characters.
Eudora and many other email programs use something called "quoted-printable" encoding to send these special characters, which requires that the receiving email program support an email standard called MIME. If the email program of your recipient is not "MIME-compliant," then they might see text that looks like this:

See ++++=20 >See ++++ run. Run, ++++, run.=20 See Jane dance.=20 >Dance,.=20 Jane, dance.=20

The solution is to turn off "quoted-printable" encoding for messages that are going to people with older mail programs.

In Eudora, there is a button in the compose mail window marked "QP." Usually it's toggled on. Press it to turn it off. It will stay off until you turn it on again.

Outlook and Outlook Express do not use quoted-printable encoding by default. You can make sure it's not on in Outlook at Tools>Options>Mail Format>Settings. The "Encode text as" item lets you choose none, quoted-printable or base64 encoding. In Outlook Express, the same choices can be found at Tools>Options>Send>Plain Text Settings (under Mail Sending Format).



extracted from:
http://www.techsoup.org/print/printp...0&type=article

Will come up with a solution for this for this project. I need you to send more reply emails to the test account with this feature.

[trackpads]

For some reason I opened it today and I am getting this -

<br />
<b>Warning</b>:  array_merge() [<a href='function.array-merge'>function.array-me
rge</a>]: Argument #1 is not an array in <b>/home/trackpad/public_html/forum/glo
bal.php</b> on line <b>335</b><br />
<br />
<b>Warning</b>:  in_array() [<a href='function.in-array'>function.in-array</a>]:
 Wrong datatype for second argument in <b>/home/trackpad/public_html/forum/inclu
des/functions.php</b> on line <b>2172</b><br />
<br />
<b>Warning</b>:  Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in <b>/home/trackpad/pu
blic_html/forum/includes/functions.php</b> on line <b>2177</b><br />

[xb_]

Originally Posted by lierduh

Usually Warnings do not affect php scripts. Strange I am not getting any warnings, even in the error log. Have you had other hacks done involves templates?

I have one hack involving templates, which is auto add template to all styles or something similair. However these kind of warnings might not be so hack (specific) related. I'm having two or three more hacks pending with similair warnings. These warnings started to occur after upgrading to php5 and upgrading to vB 3.0.3. I'm not sure (yet) which upgrade exactly implemented this.

Originally Posted by trackpads

For some reason I opened it today and I am getting this

This is exactly what i'm describing. Keep reading

Gonna read some of vB.com about this, if they mention it.

[edit] they did: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/bugs....iew&bugid=1588 It is a result of php5. I'm using the bugreport as an example to resolve the warnings throughout vB about array_merge. And it seems to fix things.[/edit]

[john_rsd]

Originally Posted by lierduh

Have you set the option in AdminCP to 1? A message must have "Re: " in the beginning of the subject before it can be threaded.

lierduh

I now installed 2.2.1 also

Where is the option in the AdminCP?

I found the attachment option and set to 0 as i do not want attachments, the delay between messages option (set to 1 to see what happens) but nothing for threading?

[john_rsd]

Originally Posted by lierduh

I have found the reason for this:


A third thing that can cause "messy" email is the fact that some older mail programs do not gracefully handle the advanced character sets that let us use "special characters" such as bullet marks, foreign letters, and other non-standard characters.
Eudora and many other email programs use something called "quoted-printable" encoding to send these special characters, which requires that the receiving email program support an email standard called MIME. If the email program of your recipient is not "MIME-compliant," then they might see text that looks like this:

See ++++=20 >See ++++ run. Run, ++++, run.=20 See Jane dance.=20 >Dance,.=20 Jane, dance.=20

The solution is to turn off "quoted-printable" encoding for messages that are going to people with older mail programs.

In Eudora, there is a button in the compose mail window marked "QP." Usually it's toggled on. Press it to turn it off. It will stay off until you turn it on again.

Outlook and Outlook Express do not use quoted-printable encoding by default. You can make sure it's not on in Outlook at Tools>Options>Mail Format>Settings. The "Encode text as" item lets you choose none, quoted-printable or base64 encoding. In Outlook Express, the same choices can be found at Tools>Options>Send>Plain Text Settings (under Mail Sending Format).



extracted from:
http://www.techsoup.org/print/printp...0&type=article

.

Ah, good, at least once a problem is defined a solution can be looked for.

I did not find the options mentioned in the article in Outlook 2003 version or Outlook express 6

Originally Posted by lierduh

Will come up with a solution for this for this project. I need you to send more reply emails to the test account with this feature.

lierduh

You want me to send more junk email ??

Seems strange requests these days when people usually do not want any more emails!

I am joking, no probs, i can send some reply

BTW I did not turn on any 'feature' just turned off all "HTML" and "rich text" options in Outlook 2003.

Excellent work..

[john_rsd]

Originally Posted by john_rsd

lierduh

I now installed 2.2.1 also

Where is the option in the AdminCP?

I found the attachment option and set to 0 as i do not want attachments, the delay between messages option (set to 1 to see what happens) but nothing for threading?

Sorry

Found it

It was not in the nntp settings within the vb admincp. I ran the file externally and it was OK.

Now all is well, must have been a cache issue or something.

[john_rsd]

lierduh

Still something up with thread by subject

http://www.proteluser.com/bbs3/forumdisplay.php?f=2

See subject

Re: [LF] AW: [LF] Tin Whiskers,Tin Finish and Accelerated Stress Testing

This was not threaded with the other posts even with 'Re' in front. Its common for mail lists to have a prefix like [name] so could 2 instances like this cause a problem?

AW is a common prefix also for reply.

This was post i expected to see it threaded with and it had already done this with one previous post.

[LF] AW: [LF] Tin Whiskers, Tin Finish and Accelerated Stress Testing

Same with the thread

[LF] LF with RF

which had 2 replies and was missed

This mostly worked 8 out of 10 times before with original gateway.php and Kevins mod.

http://proteluser.com/bbs3/forumdisp...0&daysprune=-1

What you think?

[cyc]

Hi

Has anyone noticed some posts created within in the forum are not threading properly when view with a newsreader or via google groups etc.. I have always disabled the post reply button in usenet sections, so users are forced to quote properly.

An example of what i'm talking about is

View in threaded moded within forum;

Post 1
         | Post 2
                    | Post 3
                               | Post 4

Viewed using newsreader;

Post 1
         | Post 2
         | Post 3 (reply quoting 2)
         | Post 4 (reply quoting 3)

I'n this case all posts to the thread originated from our forum and where posted within 25 minutes of each other.