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).

[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.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Brian Cruz

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?

It was programmed to do it that way. It does this because the date on posts are defined by the poster and their clocks are usually not in sync with everyone elses. What this does in the forums then is it causes some new posts to be inserted and appear before posts that were already there.

[newsguy]

Just curious:

Since VB updates sometimes change the sql table structure, what would be the effect when this gateway is installed?

Will future VB upgrades fail if they don't find the table structure they presume is there?

[Gilby]

Originally posted by newsguy
Just curious:

Since VB updates sometimes change the sql table structure, what would be the effect when this gateway is installed?

Will future VB upgrades fail if they don't find the table structure they presume is there?

This hack only adds tables and columns to the database and does not change any existing data structures, so upgrading to a new version should not be a problem for vb. However, if vb changes the data structure, then it could affect the functionality of this hack.

[rawnet]

It would be truly fantastic if a system like this existed which also adds the site's signature to any messages posted through it.

So it's advertising the site on each posting, even if the user doesn't have the site in their signature.

Can this be incorporated into the next release, or what files should we change to achieve this?

Thanks for such a useful hack - adds immeasurably to the forums,

Cheers,

Ross

[etom]

Hi Gilby.

First of all : GREAT WORK !

BUT

Your mime.php seems not to handle the following mime format:

=?iso-8859-1?q?this=20is=20some=20text?=

Many usernames contain special charsets that seem to to be encoded this way.

Where is your mime.php from ? Is there a newer version with support for it ?

PS: More Info about the format:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2047.html

Thank You
etom