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).

[shri]

Quick question incase anyone knows how this works.

How do I configure lynx to not bother with the cookies that global.php tries to send?

[Robert Basil]

Originally posted by rawnet
It would be truly fantastic if a system like this existed which also adds the site's signature to any messages posted through it.

So it's advertising the site on each posting, even if the user doesn't have the site in their signature.

Can this be incorporated into the next release, or what files should we change to achieve this?

Thanks for such a useful hack - adds immeasurably to the forums,

Cheers,

Ross

Ross,

This is very easy to do (We already do it)

Just edit your gateway.php and look for:

$signature .= "$newthread[username]'s Profile: $settings[profileurl]$newthread[userid]\n";
$signature .= "View this thread on SBW: $settings[threadurl]$newthread[threadid]\n";

And add any lines just above those you want appended to every outgoing message.

For example here is ours:

$signature .="Posted via Sportbike World - The internets largest community dedicated to sportbikes.\n";
$signature .="http://www.sportbikeworld.com\n";
$signature .= "$newthread[username]'s Profile: $settings[profileurl]$newthread[userid]\n";
$signature .= "View this thread on SBW: $settings[threadurl]$newthread[threadid]\n";

[rawnet]

Wow.

Tremendous.

May I ask - who do you use as your Usenet provider? Are there any recommendations?

[shri]

I use airnews.net ... awesome service with clarinet and other newsfeeds.

[saab340]

Well Its working great except, all the usenet posts that ends with "?" will get posted as a new post. (ie its not combining them like others.
(It gets quite wild, if there is a active topic, and all of a sudden you have 75 new posts
Does anyone else has this, or is it just us?
Thx

[Robert Basil]

Originally posted by rawnet
Wow.

Tremendous.

May I ask - who do you use as your Usenet provider? Are there any recommendations?

We use news ranger http://www.newsranger.com and they work great!

[floleb7]

i have this each time i am running gateway.php

Database error in vBulletin 2.2.2:

Invalid SQL: UPDATE forum SET replycount=replycount+1,lastpost='1016766164',last poster='Christian Daumoinx' WHERE forumid IN () mysql error: You have an error in your SQL syntax near ')' at line 1

mysql error number: 1064

what's the matter ?

[Brian Cruz]

I've noticed several newsgroups threads being downloaded incorrectly. The replies aren't going into the same thread as the original post. It doesn't happen all the time, but often enough to make things look messy. Could it possibly be related to the feature that starts new threads when a reply uses a different subject line? I'd like to try turning that off to see what happens, but I don't know where in the script that is.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Brian Cruz
I've noticed several newsgroups threads being downloaded incorrectly. The replies aren't going into the same thread as the original post. It doesn't happen all the time, but often enough to make things look messy. Could it possibly be related to the feature that starts new threads when a reply uses a different subject line? I'd like to try turning that off to see what happens, but I don't know where in the script that is.

I think I fixed it a while ago, but I must not have updated it in this thread. So, I've uploaded my latest version. The problem that i am assuming is the case here is that I did not have it match the subject correctly by using the htmlentities function as that's how they are stored in the database (ie. a " would be &quot; in the database, thus they don't match).

Also in this version is a bug fix for long threads that would have tons of references. Some nntp servers complain if this header gets too big, so this fixes that.

E-mail gateway support
Also in this version, you can now gateway with email. This will fetch emails from a POP email account and send via th mail account 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 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).

[saab340]

Upgrade...

I dont care to use this pop e-mail thingy, can I still upgrade and use this latest upgrade? How do I disable the pop?

Just want to fix the posts, so they go to their right threads

Thx