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).

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by Gilby


I would assume it does work, but i have not tried it yet. I don't think the database changed much in the new version.



Put an echo in front of all the lines that start with $request and it'll print it out.

the word echo or a @ ?

thicko here when it comes to php you know and which php file ?

[antigravityboy]

Thanks Gilby
I did what you said with the sql and everything seems to be working now.
I have another question that I know if kind of dumb, but I cannot figure it out. If I want to make a new forum in my control panel, how to I set the forum ID so that I can pipe the newsgroup posts into it . The only setting I could find to change was the order and they all seem to be set to 1
Thanks again

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by antigravityboy
Thanks Gilby
I did what you said with the sql and everything seems to be working now.
I have another question that I know if kind of dumb, but I cannot figure it out. If I want to make a new forum in my control panel, how to I set the forum ID so that I can pipe the newsgroup posts into it . The only setting I could find to change was the order and they all seem to be set to 1
Thanks again

If you hover over the forum title in the Admin CP you will see something like this:

http://wocs.net/forumdisplay.php?forumid=60

The forum ID is mentioned at the end of the link

eg: forumid=60

Thats where you get the forum ID from, all you do then is enter that number into the MySQL database in the relevent section.

Hope this answers your question.

Andrew

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by antigravityboy
Thanks Gilby
I did what you said with the sql and everything seems to be working now.
If I want to make a new forum in my control panel, how to I set the forum ID
Thanks again

I dont think you can alter or choose the forumid, the vbulletin software does that for you, if you do find away tho, give me a shout, cos my forumsids are in the 60 - 80 range, and I only have around 12 forums.

[antigravityboy]

Thanks for the reply Sanjiyan
I never understood where they got the forum Id's before.
I fixed the forum ID and ran went to the gateway.php in my browser, but it does not seem to pipe anything in, I just get this on the white screen and nothing more. Any ideas on what else I need to do, sorry to be such a pain

1 group(s) gatewayed.
Logging in to east.usenetserver.com, group alt.binaries.nude.celebrities.female

[Picolet]

<a href="http://www.africaplanet.com/" target="_blank">http://www.africaplanet.com/</a>

Success, I was able to successfully install this hack with vbulletin 2.2.4 version. You can see it in action at the above URL

[Picolet]

<a href="https://groups.google.com/groups?" target="_blank">http://groups.google.com/groups?</a>

Anyway to download and display forums based not just on a particular newsgroup but refined more by topic/word search as
is possible through doing a search at google?

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Picolet
http://groups.google.com/groups?

Anyway to download and display forums based not just on a particular newsgroup but refined more by topic/word search as
is possible through doing a search at google?

Do you mean from all newsgroups? Or posts just from one newsgroup? If the first, I am not aware of anything in the NNTP specifications that allow searching, but maybe there is. If there isn't, you'll have to download all newsgroups you want to search through and throw out the irrelevant posts.

If just in the one newsgroup you want to narrow it down, then you'd just throw out the irrelevant posts. I have not implimented anything to do this yet though.

[Picolet]

See the google search feature for the newsgroups.
I included a link to it!

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Picolet
See the google search feature for the newsgroups.
I included a link to it!

Does that mean you want it for all newsgroups? Then just set up all the newsgroups with this script! Oh and if you do that, please let me know how the script handles that many posts.

[The Realist]

I can send newsgroup messages but Iam not receiving them or they are not being posted into the section.

Whats up??

Brian

[antigravityboy]

Hey Gilby
Since you were online, I just wanted to see if I could get some feedback on getting the newsgroup posts to show up on my bulletin board. Right now I get this when I run gateway.php

1 group(s) gatewayed.
Logging in to east.usenetserver.com, group alt.binaries.nude.celebrities.female

I set the forum ID to 9 in nntp_groups which corresponds to the forums I named newsgroups on my bulletin board. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

[Brian Cruz]

Gibly,

Now that my board is downloading newsgroup posts using the cron job you specified, I've noticed that the time listed for every post is the time when it was downloaded, not the time the post was made. It didn't do that when I initially ran gateway.php to get the first batch of messages, but only since I've had it running automatically. It's strange looking at the messages and having their time all end with 5! Any idea what's causing this?

[antigravityboy]

Paid install
Hello I have tried everything I can think of but I cannot get this to work on my bulletin board. I would at this point like to pay somebody who know what they are doing to install it for me. I can pay through Paypal so if you are interested please email me and let me know how much you want to do the install.
Thank you

[v0nreagan]

Brian Cruz: AFAICS the date on posts is the date of insertion to db not the date of post on NNTP server. Even if the script would retrieve date from NNTP server I'm not quite sure it's possible to add original post date without messing about with showthread.php, showpost.php and then adding template calls.