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 Schorsch
great hack!! :bunny: some questions:

how can I leave out the signatures and user titles when posting to a group ?

edit: and how can I change the quote color ?

and when I look into a thread I can't see the poster name, always just "guest"

You'll need to edit the code and change the signature part of it to not have those variables in it.

To change the color, find in the code where it has "[color=blue]" and change those three lines to have the colors you want.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Marv
Couldn?t there be a way that this hack reads out the mail-adress from the database and takes that as signature ?

The real email address is not used simply because of email addresses being harvested as spam. What I do on my set up is have a unique domain for the email address used and then set up a catch all for the domain with an auto responder that gives details on how to reply to the user.

- Gilby

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Marv
Oups..forgotten: does anybody know if this hack works with the 3.0 RC3 ?

Give it a try and let us know!

Did you mean 2.3 RC3? IT'd probably work with that one, but might not with 3.0 as many thing may have changed.

[Chris732]

Gilby... I must say this was a wonderful hack and I have really enjoyed it on my site...Thanks again.

Oh btw... any plans on adding a way to handle newsgroup attachments with it?

[Marv]

Originally posted by Gilby


The real email address is not used simply because of email addresses being harvested as spam. What I do on my set up is have a unique domain for the email address used and then set up a catch all for the domain with an auto responder that gives details on how to reply to the user.

Hi Gilby,

it?s good to see you?re still alive & typing

What you suggested is what I already did. You know that "The good, the bad & the ugly...?" Guess the people on our german newsservers are very familiar with that and they insist to match the standard how a ng-post should be. That?s the reason for all the flames we receive...

And this nationwide standard (uh...have I told you that I?m talking about german newsgroups, yet..?) a post has to have two things:

- a proper emailadress to reach the poster and to retrace the post back to the poster

The second one is the thing I mentioned about the signature.
If a post is delivered to a ng via a gateway there has to be an adress for technical questions or in case of abuse. That?s why I suggested the quoted signature..

Okay...I read that you?ve got other projects and your time to give support to this hack is running out.
Don?t know how to say it...but would it be very impudent to ask you if you could do these minor changes for the europeans here on board .. ?

I would do it on my own - be sure - but I?m just not good in coding...umm..that means most of the time php looks to me like a bunch of celtic cuneiform script mixed with oxford english.... :alien:

Any chance you could look into it on a short moment between riding your doublewheeled unicycle und the shower ? (Btw: unicycling looks completely arduous the way you do it )

Thanks for stopping by !

[Gardener]

Originally posted by Gilby


Give it a try and let us know!

Did you mean 2.3 RC3? IT'd probably work with that one, but might not with 3.0 as many thing may have changed.

Yes it does work with 2.3 RC3. I've got it running on a board with about 200,000 posts and it works just fine.

[Duke Of Lion]

I want to add the cronjob (automatically update news)

What is the command line on a linux server with C-Panel? Just go into the cron jobs tab and then command is simply http://www.mysite.com/forum/gateway.php ? or do i need to add cron or something

[gopherhockey]

Set up a cron job in the cron job areas of cpanel (toward the bottom I believe) - if you want them to run ever 10 minutes you may have to set up multiple jobs - at least for me, I wasn't able to do a 5,15,25 etc. in the minutes column, so I set a separate one up for 5 * * * *, 15 * * * * etc.

use this:

lynx -source http://mysite.com/forums/gateway.php?log=cron >/dev/null

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Chris732
Oh btw... any plans on adding a way to handle newsgroup attachments with it?

It partially handles them now, just not the uuencoded ones. If you can find some php code that decodes uuencoded text, then it wouldn't be too hard to add.

[gopherhockey]

I'm struggling to keep this hack turned on in my forums. Here is the issue:

Users love the usenet forum that I have included. However, it gets hundreds of posts per day, and they don't like seeing those when they come to the system each day and click to "view new posts".

I have that *almost* fixed, but not quite.

First, I removed the forumid from the search function, so even if it shows new threads and forums since they last visited, all those won't appear when they click to "view new posts"

Next step was to not get new threads and posts to show up. I was able to do the threads part using another guys code example... however, I still haven't found a way around the posts part.

Basically I want the forum to work as usual, except that I don't want any of the posts or threads being counted by anything in the vb system or showing up in views such as this one:

Members: XX, Threads: YY, Posts: ZZ

Is this possible? Perhaps a line of code that is incrementing the post and thread count total can simply be removed?

Thanks...