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).

[Mark Hewitt]

Actually I've noticed my post above isn't entirely accurate. Basically because the forumdisplaybit has a "nowrap" set, long names even with spaces, do not wrap.

I don't want to get rid of this as it usually makes things look a lot neater than they would without it. So I use need a way to truncate the thread starters names.

[Gilby]

After working out the problem with Sanjiyan on his setup, I've solved the compatibility issue and am releasing a new update that is available in the first thread. If you've had problems with the sending of forum posts to the newsgroup, then this should fix them.

I also added one new feature, and that is multiple colors for the replies in imported posts. So each level has it's own color.

The database has not changed, so all you need to do is upload the gateway.php and the nntp.php files.

If you have any bugs or feature requests you want, please post them here and I'll add them to my list of things to add to the script.

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by Gilby
After working out the problem with Sanjiyan on his setup.

Yep thanks for your help with that little problem I was having Gilby, domo arigato ^_^

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by Gilby
new update

I bet you already know what I am gonna ask for...

Gilby, mate buddy pal, best buddy in all the world, (master arse kisser I am ^_- )

Do you think you could email me a copy of the nntp.php which gives me the feed back codes please...

I kinda like having them so I know that the servers working for me ^_^

Thanks in advance.

[fsfl2k]

I waited a few days for the problems to be worked out before downloading this and installing it.

I was able to install it and get it working with no problems.

The only error that arose was a mistake on my part and once corrected I was able to post and reply both on my forum and in a seperate news reader and all posts showed up with no glitches.

Thanks Gilby for taking the time to make this.
Couldn't ask for a better addition to my site.

Anthony

[James Cridland]

Great hack.

Users with Opera might like to know that you can set that browser to re-load a page every x minutes: so, if you've a permanent connection, you can force a gateway "ping" every half hour by leaving Opera on in the background.

Of course, it's also possible to add a meta-refresh in the gateway.php code itself, too - for those of us without telnet access...

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by James Cridland
Great hack.

Users with Opera might like to know that you can set that browser to re-load a page every x minutes: so, if you've a permanent connection, you can force a gateway "ping" every half hour by leaving Opera on in the background.

Of course, it's also possible to add a meta-refresh in the gateway.php code itself, too - for those of us without telnet access...

I just set this up to run every hour on the hour using MS Task Schedular:

C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE http://www.wocs.net/gateway.php

That to me is the better way, apart from the fact that if I am playing Counter Strike it pulls me out of the game screen to show that this is running. which is annoying.

[Gilby]

I just updated the zip to include a bug fix. It's just the gateway.php that needs to be uploaded.

The bug is that on outgoing posts, my regular expression removed the letter 's' if it was at the beginning of a line (for you regex people, I used \s to match whitespace, but that didn't work). Version 1.7 fixes this bug.

I also added the Ynt: prefix to be looked for for replies just like the Re: is looked for. If other languages use other prefixes for replies and you need support for it, please let me know and I'll add them.

I probably won't be releasing a new version for a while, except in the case of a bug fix, and when the admin control panel integration is finished (that GameCrash has offered to create).

[floleb7]

can i have a newsgroup without login and pas for testing the hack ? (a newsgroup wich works for someone )

[fsfl2k]

I used the one posted earlier in the tread and it worked fine. Here it is again.

newsgroup: webdiscuss.test
server: webdiscuss.com
forum: a blank test forum id

Anthony