NNTP Gateway for Usenet ( Newsgroups ), Mailing Lists

The latest version: V2.3.2 (31 Oct 2004)

What is it?

This hack provides a gateway from vBulletin forums to the USENET. It allows forum members to read newsgroup messages as well as to send posts to the newsgroups. In a nutshell, it turns vBulletin forums into a basic function news reader.

For an added bonus, this package also supports mailing list archive and forum to mailing list gateway. The software retrieves messages from a pop3 account and import them into the forums threaded. It also allows a forums user to send messages to the mailing list by the forum posting interface.

Why?

The gateway will be appreciated by forum members who do not know how to set up a news reader, or people who do not have port 119 open in their network. A forum interface to read and post news are often considered to be better than a news reader.

The gateway adds more contents to your forums and allows the members to interact with wider audience. It is common to see new users signing up to use this feature.

History

This hack is basically a hacked vB2 NNTP gateway written by Gilby to work with vB3. The original hack can be found here:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...7&page=1&pp=15


Features

Some of the features and improvement include:

• Handles both newsgroup posts and mailing lists.
• Handles MIME encoded messages and attachment.
• Handles UUEncoded messages.
• Two Admin Control Panels for all settings.
• Automated installation.
• Correct thread implementation. All imported messages and posts sent to newsgroups will be threaded correctly according to References and Message-ID headers.
• Optional setting to thread by subject for mailing lists that strip references header.
• Supports TABLE_PREFIX.
• Imported messages will be searchable just like normal forum posts.
• Similar threads are built when the messages are imported if the system setting is on.
• Multiple attachments importing.
• Save attachment to database or file according to vB setting.
• Thumbnail created while importing image files.
• Multiple attachment post to newsgroup is also supported.
• Selectable X-No-Archive header honouring system.
• Light on system resources.
• Global Killfile to filter out unwanted messages. Killfiles can have OR and AND effectiveness.
• Strip footer by setting for incoming messages. Strips out repeated message footers.
• Built options to disable signatures and footers for out going messages.

Future development

• AdminCP interfaces. (completed)
• Installation/upgrade script. (completed, coded into AdminCP)
• Traditional "> " lead posting interface.

What do you need and do not need?

You do not need to edit vB php files if you use two bookmarks
You need to edit one vB php file to insert two lines of code if you want direct click links within AdminCP.
No need to run SQL.

Installation

Basically the AdminCP interfaces take care of installation as well as upgrade in the background. Back up your database first. The scripts can modify your database without alerting you!

Please follow the instructions in the readme.txt file for more details.

Support

Please post your support questions to this thread. Please check the FAQ in the third post within this thread first.

================== UPDATES ======================
Jul 31 2004 (release version 2.2.0)

• Provided option of not importing attachments
• Provided option of pause between messages
• Provided option of not sending messages to USENET
• Provided mechanism to skip importing a message if it was crashed on it
• Provided "Default Footer" option
• Provided strip_footer function for mailing lists
  (written originally by KevinM)
• Provided Killfile functions with Header/Body/AND/OR settings
• Provided ability to thread messages by subject for mailing lists
• Provided ability to use a single POP3 account for different mailing lists
  (use prefix)
• Merged KevinM's attachment routine, save thumbnail to hard drive
  as vB3.0.3
• Official support to have the script run by Scheduled Tasks
• Many bug fixes

Please note, when you manually run the script, you must turn on the debug mode. Otherwise nothing will be displayed on the screen.

To run as debug mode: http://forums.yourdomain.com/gateway.php?debug=1

25 Oct 2004

• Provided the option of sending posts using the real email address
• Provided the option of sending posts using a fixed email address for
  each group.
• Posts are now held back if they are in the moderating queue
• Scheduled task log is now working
• Provided the option of sending the debug messages to the vB3 cron log
• Bug fixes

31 Oct 2004

Fixed bugs running the gateway by the vB3 Scheduled Tasks

1 March 2004

Uploaded the new zip file. It contains one or two bug fixes.

[john_rsd]

Originally Posted by KevinM

I will update it when Lierduh makes an 'official' release.

Cool

Thanks

[alesis404]

Originally Posted by lierduh

Have you tried the script I posted in last page?

Lierduh are you referring to post #297 of this thread? If so do i just upload the new gateway.php and this will stop the attachments or will stop the errors?

[john_rsd]

lierduh

I am still having trouble with the new gateway.php script with file attachments.

How aware is the script about which type of attachment it is?

The forum has no file upload permissions. So I tested this by emailing the account which is used for gateway with a big file and it crashed (I suspect timeouts)

So i send it a very small file to test this theory, it was a small zip file only 36kB and instead of dropping the attachment as it should, it inserted it as text below the final characters of the message, see screenshot atatched.

Anything you need me to do for you to trap what is going on?

[chopperp1]

Originally Posted by lierduh

With pop.php file, please find:

$this->_write("USER $this->username");

and insert the following line before that:

echo "=========USER Name: " . $this->username . " ==========";

This will show the user name entered by the script. I want to confirm if the right username is used by the script at this stage.

Also with gateway.php, find:

$pop_connect = $pop3->connect();

and add the following line after this:

logging($pop3->showlog());

This will show the entire pop3 connection log. No fix at this stage, just need to find out the reason behind this first.

Sorry for late response, I was away for few days.
Here's what I got after adding those lines
"...pop3 gateway

Gateway version 2.1.0 1 group(s) gatewayed. =========USER Name: yamner\******==========+OK Microsoft Exchange 2000 POP3 server version 6.0.6249.0 (dl360mail3.yamner.com) ready. USER yamner\****** -ERR Protocol error. Bad User Name!Retrieving Protocol E-mails from the '209.178.209.17' pop3 server ..."

I had to hide a user name, but real log shows correct one. Also, as you can see, this time I used external IP for pop server - different isp than board is hosting on...

[trackpads]

What is the maximum characters that we can put in the Killfile exclude field? I think I ran out already, is there a way to expand it?

Thanks again!

-Jason

[kall]

Whoooops.

When upgrading to 3.0.2, don't forget that the script will repost all of the threads already in your selected forum.

*starts composing apology emails*

[KevinM]

Originally Posted by trackpads

What is the maximum characters that we can put in the Killfile exclude field? I think I ran out already, is there a way to expand it?

It's limited to 128 characters (which is what the original scripts default settings are), and, like yourself I found it too small.

Run the following sql query and you can have up to 64000 characters (give or take!)

PHP Code:

ALTER TABLE `nntp_settings` CHANGE `value` `value` MEDIUMTEXT DEFAULT NULL  ; 


It's possible that in future upgrades of gateway.php the script may revert back to the original settings (as it auto-installs), so if there are any future gateway updates that you install you will have to run this query again after installing (and keep a copy of what's in the killfile beforehand as this may be erased).

[kall]

And here's what one nice person told me:

News has a well-defined protocol (NNTP - RFC977 etc) and if you have a program which retrieves and/or send articles then it should retain the very important "Message-ID" header which each article contains. Then if it accidentally tried to post an old article it would get rejected because of the conflicting Message-ID (unique for each article). Otherwise it would generate a unique Message-ID for a new article and present it with the "IHAVE" nntp command.

*sighs*

[AWS]

Originally Posted by kall

Whoooops.

When upgrading to 3.0.2, don't forget that the script will repost all of the threads already in your selected forum.

*starts composing apology emails*

Are you saying when you upgraded to 3.0.2 the gateway script sent all your posts to usenet from the usenet forums?

How can this happen?
You have to run gateway.php to upload new posts and it has the message id already set so duplicates shouldn't be uploaded. The only way I can see this happening is if the upgrade to 3.0.2 made all posts look as new posts or somehow the upgrade lost all id numbers in the db.

[kall]

Originally Posted by AWS

The only way I can see this happening is if the upgrade to 3.0.2 made all posts look as new posts or somehow the upgrade lost all id numbers in the db.

*nods*

That's what happened, because I ended up doing the upgrade by installing afresh and importing all of the posts etc using Impex..obviously losing the columns that denoted the threads as being 'old'.