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).

[Cluster One]

Well it seems to be getting my login and password, its just not pulling anything from the server.

[allan grossman]

Originally Posted by Cluster One

Well it seems to be getting my login and password, its just not pulling anything from the server.

If it was getting your password you wouldn't be getting the 381 error

[Cluster One]

Doh, you are correct sir, thank you. Well I have tried pretty much everything and I am about ready to toss in the towel. I've re-installed it twice. It just shows the same screen.

Could it be something in the nntp.sql that didn't go in correctly? or need to be changed?

[Cluster One]

Okay, i've added my login/pass into the SQL. It shows up there, but somehow the server is just not recieving it.

Its mind boggling.

[lierduh]

I have uploaded a newer gateway.php to page 44 to handle multiple attachments.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=658

[recumbent615]

I have been using this hack for months now, and Love it. I have only used the Email ( POP3) part of the software but resently have been attempting to suck down about 30-40K messages from a news group. I have run into several issues with this, first I time out. This is a manageble issue, I just take the last message # and plug it into the last message # field under edit, and start the process again. The larger issue is the post date. I would have expected that the post date would use the date from the news group. and it looked like it did for the first 2k ( the first pass that timed out ) but not for any of the follow on grabs. Is there something I can do to correct this ? or better yet is there someplace that I can stop the timeout. I've upped the run time in php.ini to 14400 ( 4 hours ) and it still says that there was a 60 second time out, that is just not right as it does run for 15-20 minutes before it times out.

Any Ideas

Kevin B

[recumbent615]

OK I have not found a solution for this issue, but I believe that the failures are the reason that the date is off. Is there a way to limit the Number of new messages that the program will download in a single session ? It seems like I get around 2000 to 2200 messages each time before the timeout, What I'd like to do is only download 1000 messages and then diconnect, I believe that this will take care of the date issue.

Kevin

[lierduh]

The gateway downloads where the last download left by the message number. You can find the message number for your server in the header. eg.

Xref: freenews.iinet.net.au aus.photo:73361

The 73361 is the message number. Set this number in your database (lastmsg), it will only download the messages higher than this message number.

[recumbent615]

OK, Here is the solution for regulating the # of messages to download on each pass.

in gateway.php find

PHP Code:

    // retrieve each message and process
    if ($grouptype == 'news'){
        $lastmsg = ($group[lastmsg] >= $news->min()) ? $group[lastmsg] : $news->min();
        $max = $news->max();
    } else {
        $lastmsg = 0;
        $max = $Count;
    }
    for ($current = $lastmsg+1; $current <= $max; $current++){ 


and replace it with this

PHP Code:

    // retrieve each message and process
    if ($grouptype == 'news'){
        $lastmsg = ($group[lastmsg] >= $news->min()) ? $group[lastmsg] : $news->min();
        $max = $news->max();
    } else {
        $lastmsg = 0;
        $max = $Count;
    }
    // Total to grab at one time
    $grab = 500;
     
    if (( $max - $lastmsg ) > $grab ) {
        $max = $lastmsg + $grab ;
        echo "Downloading messages from ".$lastmsg." to ".$max."<br>";
    }    
    for ($current = $lastmsg+1; $current <= $max; $current++){ 


To deal with the Date Stamp issue I have made one change that I plan on removing when I've uploaded all of the back posts from the news groups.

PHP Code:

            if ($group[lastmsg] == 0){
                $date = strtotime($message[date]);
            } else {
                $date = strtotime($message[date]);
                // $date = time();
            } 


[stroke25]

Im trying to change the email settings used with usenet posts.Right now it adds numbers and letters in between user name and Domain name..Example

KGB.11h4mb@pokerhelper.com KGB.11g8ob@pokerhelper.com StopTheKicking.127uvy@pokerhelper.com

I would like it to be username@pokerhelper.com