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


And an upgrade to 2.2.5? do you know if it happened with 2.2.4 of vb and 1.9 of the gateway?

didnt use 1.9, I used the version you edited for me.

So 2.2.5 and 1.9 are both new.

[Gilby]

> didnt use 1.9, I used the version you edited for me.

What version did I edit for you? If I did, it was from a while back and
would not have the email support.

- Gilby

[Sanjiyan]

nope it didnt have email support, it was the version that you made for me that reported the feedback.. it was a while back ^_^

[jarvis]

Has anyone tried the "prune messages" function with this? It seemed like the first time I did this, it reset my 'last msg ID' field to 0?

[patvdv]

I absolutely *love* this hack and would dearly like to use it on my board. However the long usernames from usenet tend to be cumbersome indeed. Is there a way to hack gateway.php so that let's say only the first 20 characters of the username are uploaded? I am not really worried about chopped off usernames.

[Robert Basil]

Originally posted by patvdv
I absolutely *love* this hack and would dearly like to use it on my board. However the long usernames from usenet tend to be cumbersome indeed. Is there a way to hack gateway.php so that let's say only the first 20 characters of the username are uploaded? I am not really worried about chopped off usernames.

I agree, this would be a nice addition.

P.S. Gilby this is my #1 favorite hack (and I have over 25 of em installed, and have created about 15 of my own) thanks again!

[patvdv]

I figured it out myself and it seems to work OK. Ideally I would like to see the username length as a parameter in the nntp_settings table

In gateway.php find each instance of:

PHP Code:

from_name($message[from]) 


and replace by

PHP Code:

substr(from_name($message[from]),0,15) 


to get a 15 character delimited username.

[patvdv]

Originally posted by jarvis
Has anyone tried the "prune messages" function with this? It seemed like the first time I did this, it reset my 'last msg ID' field to 0?

Yes that happens to me to. I guess you can run setlastmsg.php again as a workaround but it would be nice if the last msg ID was preserved automatically.

Better even would be if the NNTP gateway had its own pruning mechanism for those forums in which you import the usenet posts. For e.g. if you schedule the gateway job every hour, it would be *perfect* if it could also check for posts older than x days and remove them from the board

Gilby, would you consider such an addition?

[Gilby]

Originally posted by jarvis
Has anyone tried the "prune messages" function with this? It seemed like the first time I did this, it reset my 'last msg ID' field to 0?

Are you using the prune messages function that is in the vb control panel? I can't see how or why that would even touch the nntp table in the database.

[patvdv]

Originally posted by Gilby


Are you using the prune messages function that is in the vb control panel? I can't see how or why that would even touch the nntp table in the database.

Gilby, yes I am (also) using 'Mass Prune' from the AdminCP and the behaviour is consistently the same. Deleting all posts from a forum resets the msgid field. Btw, I am using vb 2.2.4

Superb hack though I hope you will continue developing it.

Regards,

Pat.