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).

[Okiewan]

I have installed the hack okay, but received a lot of complaints as my users became lost in the mix between my forum postings and newsgroup postings.

Ditto!

[antigravityboy]

Anybody have an idea on what I have to do so that binary attachments are displayed as pictures and not cryptic code.
Still trying to figure it out.
Thanks

[Gilby]

Originally posted by antigravityboy
Anybody have an idea on what I have to do so that binary attachments are displayed as pictures and not cryptic code.
Still trying to figure it out.
Thanks

The problem is with uuencoded attachemnts that are not attached using mime. That should give you some stuff to look for, but I'll address this issue in a future release when I have a chance.

[antigravityboy]

Thanks I will check with my hosting company

[Okiewan]

Anyway to truncate author names ? Either from the newsgroups or ALL authors?

[Brian Cruz]

I've noticed that whenever one of my users includes a link in their newsgroup post, it's gets converted to a tinyurl.com link when viewed on the actual group. Can this function be turned off? It's hard for us to promote our site when the link isn't even ours!

[rawnet]

Hi,

I'm having problems with my gateway.php script not importing all the posts from the Newsgroup.

Really I only need those in the past 3 months or so, not the entire newsgroup which contains hundreds of thousands it seems(the alt.military newsgroup for example).

I'm getting the message that my script has exceeded it's maximum execution time - so, how do I import all the required newsgroup postings, or limit them to the past x posts in a particular newsgroup?

Thanks for the continued support on this dude,

Cheers for now,

Ross

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Brian Cruz
I've noticed that whenever one of my users includes a link in their newsgroup post, it's gets converted to a tinyurl.com link when viewed on the actual group. Can this function be turned off? It's hard for us to promote our site when the link isn't even ours!

TinyURl turns your long links into shorter ones that fit nicely into emails and do not wrap. You can adjust the length at when it turns them into a TinyURL by going in the settings and entering in a higher number.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by rawnet
I'm getting the message that my script has exceeded it's maximum execution time - so, how do I import all the required newsgroup postings, or limit them to the past x posts in a particular newsgroup?

You shouldn't get that error, unless the php installation you are using is running in safe mode, which is likely the case for you. Anyways, you'll need to log into your newsgrop server with another news program and find the id of the message you want to start from and enter that number in the database under the lastmsg column. The number can be found in the header of the message at the end of the Xref line.

[Brian Cruz]

Originally posted by Gilby


TinyURl turns your long links into shorter ones that fit nicely into emails and do not wrap. You can adjust the length at when it turns them into a TinyURL by going in the settings and entering in a higher number.

Thanks Gilby, I should have realized that!

BTW, I noticed something odd while looking through the database with phpMyAdmin. Every thread I look at has a msgid value of <Matthew.Hunter.2anka@toonzone.net>, even non-newsgroup threads. Matthew Hunter is the name of one if my users. Any idea why this is?