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).

[Dave#]

Originally posted by 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?

no

[Marv]

Hi Gilby,

come into my arms This is what I was looking for since I started my own bb.
I must confess that I?m an old UBB-user and changed the bb-soft just with beginning of last week, so I?m not very familiar with php yet.

Gilby,
I run into some problems while installing your hack and after reading this 300 posts here, I still haven`t found a solution for it.

I?m on a shared server with php 4.2.1 installed and using NNTP Gateway 1.9 with the latest nntp.php you attached here few threads above.

I tried to figure out how this can work for me, but now after 6 hours I?m tiered and about to give up..

The nntp tells me while gateway.php is doing his job:

PHP Code:

1 group(s) gatewayed.
200 Welcome to post.usenet.com. No Spamming is allowed! Please vist [url]http://www.usenet.com[/url] for premium Usenet Newsgroup services, 5.5h2, S0
Logging in to post.usenet.com, group test
211 12 41913 41924 test selected340 Ok, recommended ID <3d150ce9$1@post.usenet.com>Posting Message from Testuser: 340 Ok, recommended ID <3d150ce9$1@post.usenet.com> 


After that it?s running in a timeout and the browser stops - don?t know wether the servers timout or a timelimit in the nntp-script files and
the articles which seems to be send cannot be found in the targeted newsgroup.

Could you give me a little support for this ?

And by the way...you dunno how hard is it to read 300 articles in english...when your own language is german.. uhh.. gre: :surprised:


Hope you keep up the good work - IMHO this hack is godlike (guess the UT-players know what i mean..) and I would appreciate, that there would be others like that coming up in the next weeks :knockedout:

As Said: congratz, Gilby..
Marv.

[Marv]

Gilby,

i missed to tell you of another problem. Everytime I click the gateway.php all messages in our board are send again. That means not new articles - the same posts as the last 50 times before

Another thingy is that you can?t hit the reply-Button (send eMail to the author) cause the email-adress is totally wrong.. (for example (Boardname Admin, origin-eMail: webmaster@domain.com turns into name "Admin" and email "Admin.6p21i@(tempdirectory).domain.com") - means, it won?t work.

Any suggestions for that, Gilbert?

[Marv]

uhmm...

installed the GUI now and gave the "Manual Syncronisation" a try.
But - havn?t I expected an error? - the echo is

PHP Code:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare stripslashesarray() in /homepages/xx/xxxxxxxxxx/htdocs/forum/admin/global.php on line 33 


But line 33@global.php is like this:

PHP Code:

 // get rid of slashes in get / post / cookie data
function stripslashesarray (&$arr) {
  while (list($key,$val)=each($arr)) {
    if ($key!="templatesused" and $key!="argc" and $key!="argv") {
            if (is_string($val) AND (strtoupper($key)!=$key OR ("".intval($key)=="$key"))) {
                $arr["$key"] = stripslashes($val);
            } else if (is_array($val) AND ($key == 'HTTP_POST_VARS' OR $key == 'HTTP_GET_VARS' OR strtoupper($key)!=$key)) {
                $arr["$key"] = stripslashesarray($val);
            }
      }
  }
  return $arr;
} 


Okay..I?m a php-newbie so I can?t read the php-script und get the point of what it tries to tell me. I have no glue what?s going wrong..

Is there a personal interpreter out there for me ?

[Marv]

when I read all these articles from people keep on debugging some (mostly the own) minor errors, wouldn´t this addon be better placed in a beta-forum?

I don´t wanna say that this addon was a way early released - but people like me which aren´t to familiar with php and/or mySQL can´t do a debugging by their own and running in a little frustration :ermm:

Just my two thoughts..

[Dmitriy]

This addon has many issues, but they usually realted to servers, not the script.

Basically, this addon is not easy to add and it may not work on all types of servers.

- You need to have access to newsgroup server provided by your webhost and not all webhosts have it.

- Even if you have newsgroup access provided by your ISP, ISP may have it setup in such way that it will not work from outside their network, meaning that if you can access newsgroups from home, you may not be able to use the same account to access from your webserver.

- Even if you have access to news server, your host's news server (or any news server for that matter) may not have the access to newsgroup that you interested in.

- You need to make sure that TCP port 119 is open on your server

- You may need to compile the php with imap support, as stated by Gilby in one of these posts.

- In order to complie php with imap, you also need to install imap c-client library on the server first. From here:
ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/
Warninga big pain to install)

- If you need to install imap c-client libraries, you need to be sure that imapd is running of your server. If it's not running, you may need to add imapd to your /etc/services file and kill -HUP inetd

As you can see, a lot of things must go right before this addon will work.

Some people lucky and have all of these things already setup on the server, but some are not.

I know, I'be been though all these steps and finally got this thing to work.

The addon itself is a pretty much complete version, not beta, it's just it's a lot more difficult to get it to work than most other add-ons.

[Bro_Joey_Gowdy]

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

so does anyone know of any cheap ones that do ?

In other words - anyone know of any cheap usenet account providers ?

[Marv]

Originally posted by Dmitriy
This addon has many issues, but they usually realted to servers, not the script.

Basically, this addon is not easy to add and it may not work on all types of servers.

Dmitriy, may be my posting came out wrong.

What you?ve mentioned is absolutly correct. It?s not as obvious to users like me, that an installation note can?t include & cover all types of local server-configurations.

What I would like to see is a little troubleshooting advice in there. As far as I can see most people here have run into 3 to 5 serious problems until they?ve got this addon to work. I would appreciate if the documentation could include those 5 cases with a little more detailed explanations. On the other side this needs additional time and work on it - and I don?t know if I could afford that if I would walk in Gilby?s shoes..

Sure - I can?t expect this. I have to be more than glad, that Gilbert had the time, the know-how and the mood to write this gateway-script - and finally to release this to public.

So..you?re right - the addon isn?t beta. And the more I think this over the more I got a glue, that it?s may be me who is in early beta...

Ermm... umm..for my taste this is a bit too much truth for today.. :speechless:

[Bro_Joey_Gowdy]

hmmm......

i believe im being ignored...

[Marv]

Hi everybody,

their are some things which we should keep in mind before we should use this addon, like the following restrictions which you find on most (german) newservers:

Users of the newsserver are expected to follow this set of rules.
Disregarding the rules may cause termination of access privileges without further notice.

Accurate Sender Address
The e-mail addresses in From:, Reply-To:, and Sender: fields must belong to you and they have to be valid. Using identifiers of other individuals without their permission or e-mail addresses that will bounce is not permitted. (For more details see paragraph 5.3 of the FAQ.)


No Control Messages
Users are not allowed to post control messages at this server. The only exception is to cancel your own articles.

Gilby?s fabulous hack doesn?t include the origin real email-adresses of the boardmembers to the postings which are being send to the newsgroups.
This is a serious problem in most countries and newsgroups and one of the bigger offenses you can run into..

I just don?t know how, but - in smple words - would it be that difficult to read out the eMail-adresses from the db so that Gilby?s addon can generate the valid emailadresse like

From: "Marvin Brandon" <marvin.brandon@gmx.de>

Does anyone has a glue how we could solve this ? Any suggestions ?


Another question..:
In point 2 of the newsserver rules they talk about "No Control Messages ". Is this NNTP-gateway script doing something like that ?

Marv.