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


Did anything happen? Any errors appear?

nope no errors, just a blank white IE screen.

I didnt run it as cron, I just ran it from the address bar on IE, as I dont have access to cron and this will be ok with me, cos I can use MS TASK to run the url every 1 hour :P

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Erwin Loh
One question: If I don't do a cron job, then I have to manually run the gateway.php file myself - is that right?

That's correct.

[Sanjiyan]

If you wish to try the link on my site Gilby:

http://www.wocs.net/gateway.php

You can see it just gives you a blank screen.

Urm I run my forums on the root of my domain, mainly because thats all I have on my website for now and the for seeable future.

Thanks

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by Gilby


I fixed the SQL in the first post. Please give this update a try. I removed the footer column at the last minute because I didn't implement any use for it and it might confuse some just by being there.

I have ran a file compare on the sql file I edited and your new one and they are exatcly the same so I shall refrane from uploading this one, as theres no changes to the code. Just thought I'd let you know.

[dost]

Originally posted by Sanjiyan
nope no errors, just a blank white IE screen.

I didnt run it as cron, I just ran it from the address bar on IE, as I dont have access to cron and this will be ok with me, cos I can use MS TASK to run the url every 1 hour :P

Same thing happened to me, but I found a solution. I searched my machine and found a file called pear.php.in, then I copied it to my forum folder and renamed it to pear.php and it worked.

Gilby: Some Turks use both the Re: and Ynt: prefix for replies in newsgroups. What can I do to recognize posts starting with Ynt: prefix as replies?

Thanks for the great hack

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by dost
Same thing happened to me, but I found a solution. I searched my machine and found a file called pear.php.in, then I copied it to my forum folder and renamed it to pear.php and it worked.

Gilby: Some Turks use both the Re: and Ynt: prefix for replies in newsgroups. What can I do to recognize posts starting with Ynt: prefix as replies?

Thanks for the great hack

I dont have complete access to my webhosts hard disk only to my website as it where, is it possible for you to send me that file and I can see if I can do the same? or do you want me to leave this to you Gilby?

[dost]

Well, I attached the pear.php that comes with my nusphere installation. I hope that's not illegal

And be careful about choosing an empty forum for the news posts. I was trying it on my computer and I chose an existing forum, then it posted 140 posts in a minute from my computer to the newsgroup. It was too late when I realized it and I had to apologize :surprised

[Gilby]

Originally posted by dost
Same thing happened to me, but I found a solution. I searched my machine and found a file called pear.php.in, then I copied it to my forum folder and renamed it to pear.php and it worked.

Ah... I was puzzled. The only thing I could figure was that there were no newsgroups in the database. Since it looks like the PEAR is a problem, I'll have to modify the NNTP class to not require it.

Originally posted by dost

Gilby: Some Turks use both the Re: and Ynt: prefix for replies in newsgroups. What can I do to recognize posts starting with Ynt: prefix as replies?

On line 124 and 125, replace those similar lines with:

if (eregi("^(Re:|Ynt:)", $message[subject])){
$subject = eregi_replace("^((Re:|Ynt:)[ ]*)+","",$message[subject]);

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by dost
Well, I attached the pear.php that comes with my nusphere installation. I hope that's not illegal

And be careful about choosing an empty forum for the news posts. I was trying it on my computer and I chose an existing forum, then it posted 140 posts in a minute from my computer to the newsgroup. It was too late when I realized it and I had to apologize :surprised

still dont work, still getting a blank white screen with no error messages, with the status bar saying 'Done'

[dost]

Originally posted by Sanjiyan
still dont work, still getting a blank white screen with no error messages, with the status bar saying 'Done'

The instructions are a bit unclear for new users. You may have forgotten to go to the nntp_groups table with phpMyAdmin and say Insert. There you have to insert your newsgroup settings.