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 Odoin

I have not changed useragent... but I have changed organization but that was when I first set it up...

I added another newsgroup and still getting double posting... however the first newsgroup does not do this...

Any ideas?

It is possible your news server changed your organization to a default one. Please check the header of the messages posted from your forums. You should be able to check with your normal news reader, failing that, use Google.

The original script only checks the useragent. The reason I added the organization check is if two forums are using the same news server with the same useagent, then the messages posted from the fellow forums will be skipped! I can add an option to disable organization check with the next version. Weekend is coming... In the meantime, find:

         if ($message['user-agent'] == $settings['useragent'] AND
                 $message['organization'] == $settings['organization']) {

and replace it with:

         if ($message['user-agent'] == $settings['useragent']) {

[Odoin]

Yes they change my organization to: 100ProofNews.com - Unlimited Downloads - $8.95/Month ARG....

So can I change the useragent to prevent skipping from another forum?

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by Odoin

Yes they change my organization to: 100ProofNews.com - Unlimited Downloads - $8.95/Month ARG....

So can I change the useragent to prevent skipping from another forum?

Yes, but first you need to change the code as indicated above. Gee, I can't believe they put advertising in your message header. I am sure that is against RFC1036!

[Odoin]

That worked ... Thank you so much for the quick replys .

[Odoin]

One other questions... Is there a way to change the display named on the who is online to something other then showing the gateway.php file being ran from a guest with the cron runs it?

[Highlander]

Hello

i just installed everything (uploaded files and tried making some settings)

But everytime i insert news server:
SERVER: msnews.microsoft.com
GROUP: microsoft.public.access

..for testing and calling gateway.php he want to donwload more than 30MB of data. should i let him finish the download?

Please help just one time till i check out how it works .. what settings , wich server and wich group with wich Last Message ID should i type in the settings?

i just need a more detailed guide for the first setup .. my forum Id ist 520 but nothing is imported there even if i downlaod 30Mb of data with gateway.php .. i just abort every time cause 30Mb of data wont fit never in the sql database.

What can i do and wich group/server i can use to try it out a little bit ..

greetings
Daniel

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by Highlander

Hello

But everytime i insert news server:
SERVER: msnews.microsoft.com
GROUP: microsoft.public.access

Please help just one time till i check out how it works .. what settings , wich server and wich group with wich Last Message ID should i type in the settings?
Daniel

Set Last Message ID to 73610. If there is anything, please cut and paste the screen dump.

[Highlander]

i set everything and the message id i set also .. than i called the setlastmsg.php and after it the gateway.php ..

but no messages appear and my test messages dont semms to be uploaded.. i will test just a little bit more ..

but for another try it maybe could be useful to copy your settings for testing (for ex. another news server with group)

..thx for you quick reply on this

[Highlander]

it is normal that hw want to downlaod with gateway,php more than 50MB ? (i aborted it after it reqached 50MB) .. <- its the buffering you described? .. i inserted the message id you gave me

[xb_]

hi

I see alot of discussion about the nntp / usenet features of the hack, while i primary use it for a mailing list archive, but not without problems (unfortunatelly).

There is this one guy on the list, whos' messages don't show up (i was thinking, he uses an encoding of some sort, which isn't supported by the hack), however they appear as an empty post, including a title and author. An example email of that specific author, can be found here.

When i don't manually edit the gateway.php to include a valid userid in the posts, the messages won't show up at all on the forumdisplay. I'm not entirelly sure what or why this is happening. (could be a permission thing in vB, as guest users don't have permissions in that specific forum)

And last, it appears that i'm having alot of 0 byte attachements; It are actually the only attachements i'm getting. So something is wrong with the insertion of those, in my setup.

[edit] in the admin page, theres some routine which creates a new table, if it thinks that the original nntp_groups doesn't excist. However this routine doesn't make notice of the TABLE_PREFIX variable, so if it is set, you'll end up with an additional empty table.[/edit].


But besides the above, everything seems to work quiet alrite. Nice work so far, although i would like to see some more discussion about mailing list archive setups.