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).

[jschefdog]

One more piece of information that might help. I tried running gateway.php again with the debugging version of nntp.php that Gilby posted and showqueries=1. Here is the output (changed the server and group names since they are inside our firewall). The reponse from the server would seem to indicate that it's connecting, but IE says done in a few seconds and it never retrieves any posts. Any tips on how to debug this problem would be appreciated. I'm trying this on a test system, not my production vBulletin install, so I can try just about anything.

1 group(s) gatewayed.
200 internal.server.name.com NNTPcache server V2.3.3 [see www.nntpcache.org] (c) 1996-1998 Julian Assange May 30 2000 ready (posting ok).
Logging in to internal.server.name.com, group group.name
Query: SELECT post.postid,post.username,post.userid,post.datelin e,post.attachmentid,post.pagetext,post.showsignatu re,post.ipaddress,thread.pollid,thread.title,post. threadid,thread.forumid FROM thread,post WHERE post.isusenetpost=0 AND thread.threadid=post.threadid AND post.dateline=thread.dateline AND post.userid=thread.postuserid AND (thread.forumid=10)
Time before: 0.524605035782
Time after: 0.528924942017

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query: SELECT post.postid,post.username,post.userid,post.datelin e,post.attachmentid,post.pagetext,post.showsignatu re,post.ipaddress,thread.title,post.threadid,threa d.forumid,thread.msgid,thread.prefix FROM thread,post WHERE post.isusenetpost=0 AND thread.threadid=post.threadid AND (thread.forumid=10)
Time before: 0.529515981674
Time after: 0.533061981201

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query: UPDATE session SET lastactivity=1024014495,location='/test_vb2/gateway.php?showqueries=1' WHERE sessionhash='b70bb4c090bf80e2c6b0b5e5b1ab3daa'
Time before: 0.535089015961
Time after: 0.536486029625

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Query: UPDATE user SET lastactivity=1024014495,inforum='0' WHERE userid='1'
Time before: 0.53685605526
Time after: 0.538607001305

[jschefdog]

I don't know if anyone's listening. I think I have found the source of the problem, but don't know how to fix it. If I add an echo to line 86 of gateway.php (v1.9) as follows:

echo $max = $news->max();

I get the following message when I run it.

1 group(s) gatewayed.
200 news.server.company.com NNTPcache server V2.3.3 [see www.nntpcache.org] (c) 1996-1998 Julian Assange <proff@iq.org> May 30 2000 ready (posting ok).
Logging in to news.server.company.com, group company.news.test
ok).

For some reason the funtion that is trying to determine the max post number is picking up the last part of the prompt returned by the news server login. I don't know PHP so can't figure out why this is happening. Any suggestions?

I put a test post into the forum and discovered that it will add a new post to the newsgroup, but it never downloads any threads probably due to the problem described above.

[jschefdog]

Well, I may not know PHP, but I was able to figure it out by using the echo command to see what was happening. The problem was the extremely long (151 chars) login response being returned by our news server. The fix is to edit line 75 in the nntp.php file:

$response = fgets($fp, 128);

and change the number to 256. After this change all the threads were downloaded.

[jschefdog]

OK, I spoke too soon. Got all the posts downloaded, but I am also seeing the "ignore list" problem. When I open a thread, every post says:

This person is on your Ignore List. To view this post click [here]

Did anyone every figure out what causes this problem? I am running vBulletin 2.2.5 like the others who reported it.

[jschefdog]

A search of the vBulleting community forum uncovered that the ignore list problem was fixed in version 2.2.6. It affected any post made by a userid which was not in the user table. Since the NNTP hack set the userid to zero for all imported posts, they were affected by this bug. If you have this problem try upgrading to v2.2.6.

[saab340]

I just upgraded vbulletin from 2.2.4 to 2.2.6 and now my usenet groups are not downloading??? I see it connects to usergroups, but nothing is downloaded. I am using little modded 1.8 version of nntp.

Thanks for help.

Turned the erro log on, and I am getting bunch of these:

Use of undefined constant lastmsg....
Use of undefined constant forum.....
Use of undefined constant flush....
Use of undefined constant prefix - assumed 'prefix' in <b>/home...

And also my host upgraded their PHP. so thats why I upgraded my vbulletin, it was giving some errors. php 4.2.1

[Bro_Joey_Gowdy]

<a href="http://www.joeygowdy.com/forum/gateway.php" target="_blank">http://www.joeygowdy.com/forum/gateway.php</a>

4 group(s) gatewayed.
Could not connect to NNTP-serverLogging in to .dixie-net.com, group alt.music.christian

Ive inputted all the usenet servers i want downloaded to my site... yet it still doesnt work... any thoughts ?

[Dmitriy]

I don't konw if this has already been asked before, I could not find an answer: Does the php have to be compiled --with-imap in order for this hack to work?

[Bro_Joey_Gowdy]

Originally posted by Bro_Joey_Gowdy
http://www.joeygowdy.com/forum/gateway.php

4 group(s) gatewayed.
Could not connect to NNTP-serverLogging in to *.dixie-net.com, group alt.music.christian


Ive inputted all the usenet servers i want downloaded to my site... yet it still doesnt work...

So does anyone have any thoughts ?

[Bro_Joey_Gowdy]

Lovely - just found out my isp doesnt support usenet --

so does anyone know of any cheap servers that do ?