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).

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Picolet
So is there a way to login using your username and password to your ISP news server?

Depending on your ISP, you might be able to use your regular username and password that you use to log in to teh internet. You may need to ask your ISP if there is a way for you to log in to the server from an external site.

Originally posted by Picolet

How do you include username and password I do not se anywhere in the settings to set those......

In the nntp_groups table, there is a column for the username and one for the password.

[Brian Cruz]

I just installed the hack, and everything seems to work except for proper branching of posts when they appear in the newsgroup.

This is what happened: I started a new thread, and then posted a reply. Then I replied to that reply, but instead of continuing the branch, it appeared as a reply to the original post. When it appears this way on the newsgroup, it could make reading the thread difficult.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Brian Cruz
This is what happened: I started a new thread, and then posted a reply. Then I replied to that reply, but instead of continuing the branch, it appeared as a reply to the original post. When it appears this way on the newsgroup, it could make reading the thread difficult.

vB is not a threaded forum software, but apparently in version 3 of vB, this will be supported.

However, in a future version of this hack, I may try to find out which post it is a direct reply to by looking at the quotes in the post.

[Brian Cruz]

Originally posted by Gilby


vB is not a threaded forum software, but apparently in version 3 of vB, this will be supported.
However, in a future version of this hack, I may try to find out which post it is a direct reply to by looking at the quotes in the post.

Fair enough. Until then, I'll use this hack for reading instead of posting. And thanks for the quick reply!

[Picolet]

Database error in vBulletin 2.2.2:

Invalid SQL: UPDATE forum SET replycount=replycount+1,threadcount=threadcount+1, lastpost='1014743904',lastpost er='John Andrews' WHERE forumid IN ()
mysql error: You have an error in your SQL syntax near ')' at line 1

What is causing this?

[AJR]

Thumbs up to you Gilby on an excellent job! I installed it a few days ago and everything is working great...except for a few minor internal issues! I tried the other usenet hack, but it seemed to be way to slow (don't know why). I only retrieve one newsgroup (rec.games.pinball) for my site right now, but the initial 4,200 messages came through in about 2 minutes! Each update (every 4-6 hours) takes less than 20 seconds! My updates are spread out that long because I can't get the crontab working for some reason. No biggie... I'll figure it out!

Here is what I am running:
- vBulletin 2.2.0
- vBPortal 3.0pr7
- Mammothnews.net server

I have been a member of Mammothnews.net for about 2 years now, and for only $9.95/mo, I get EVERYTHING! I was tired of incomplete binary multi-threads (especially when downloading MAME games)!

Anyway, here is a list of things I'd like to see in your upcoming versions (all relate to vBulletin and all were able in other usenet hack):
- As mentioned a few posts above, 'isusenetthread' as a table field would be very helpful so that usenet posts AND threads could not be counted on the forum homepage.
- Ability to not show new usenet posts when 'Get New Posts' is clicked.

Other than that, everyone loves being able to access rec.games.pinball from my site now! It is the only means for some to access the newsgroup at work (on their lunch hour of course ). Keep up the great work!

[antigravityboy]

Hey Gilby
Thanks for creating this hack, I have been waiting for this for a long long time.
I tried going to the gateway.php url on my server and I got this error.

Database error in vBulletin 2.2.2:

Invalid SQL: SELECT post.postid,post.username,post.userid,post.datelin e,post.attachmentid,post.paget ext,post.showsignature,post.ipaddress,thread.title ,post.threadid,thread.forumid, thread.msgid,thread.prefix FROM thread,post WHERE post.isusenetpost=0 AND thread.threadid=post.threadid AND (thread.forumid=1)
mysql error: Unknown column 'thread.prefix' in 'field list'

mysql error number: 1054

Any idea on what I need to fix.
Thanks everybody

[Gilby]

Originally posted by antigravityboy

mysql error: Unknown column 'thread.prefix' in 'field list'

Did you run the SQL? You need to run it for this hack to work as it adds columns to some tables, like the prefix column in the thread table, and it adds new tables.

[antigravityboy]

Thanks for the reply Gilby
I did run them, I had fastforwards hack before so I get this error when I run nntp.sql
SQL-query :

CREATE TABLE nntp_groups (
newsgroup varchar(200) NOT NULL default '',
forum varchar(32) NOT NULL default '0',
prefix varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
lastmsg int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
server varchar(64) default NULL,
username varchar(32) default NULL,
password varchar(32) default NULL,
enabled int(11) NOT NULL default '1',
PRIMARY KEY (newsgroup),
KEY forum (forum)
) TYPE=ISAM PACK_KEYS=1

MySQL said:

Table 'nntp_groups' already exists

or this error when I run upgrade.sql

Error
SQL-query :

CREATE TABLE nntp_groups (
newsgroup varchar(200) NOT NULL default '',
forum varchar(32) NOT NULL default '0',
prefix varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
lastmsg int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
server varchar(64) default NULL,
username varchar(32) default NULL,
password varchar(32) default NULL,
enabled int(11) NOT NULL default '1',
PRIMARY KEY (newsgroup),
KEY forum (forum)
) TYPE=ISAM PACK_KEYS=1

MySQL said:

Table 'nntp_groups' already exists

Would it be easier to just delete all the old tables and re-run the nntp.sql, I just did not know which ones I need to delete.
Thanks

[Gilby]

Originally posted by antigravityboy
Would it be easier to just delete all the old tables and re-run the nntp.sql, I just did not know which ones I need to delete.
Thanks

Delete the nntp_* tables and rerun the upgrade.sql script. I guessing that the tables have duplicates in them since you've run them a few times. If after doing that and it doesn't work, then run the few lines at the bottom of the sql file separately, one line at a time.