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).

[ryancooper]

Hey Guys; great hack!
This is the error I get when I try to post a message?

Posting Message from Ryan C.: 500 What?
Posting Message from Ryan C.: 500 What?
Posting Message from Ryan C.: 500 What?
Posting Message from Ryan C.: 500 What?

What does that mean?

[Jose]

Nice hack! Easy to install, and works nicely. My only wish is to be able to set up a newsgroup or POP email that is read-only. That is, posts/emails are read and posted to the forum, but forum replies or new threads are not sent outside the forum. I'm thinking of a different value for the 'enabled' field, or via the use of the "undocumented" prefix.

Any volunteers to try to do this? If no takers, I might do it next weekend.

[Gardener]

Jose,

I use the hack too, and love it. You should be able to set the news group to read only in the Forums & Moderators >> Permissions section of your admin panel. I haven't tried it for the news groups, but it should work.

[Jose]

Originally posted by Gardener
Jose,

I use the hack too, and love it. You should be able to set the news group to read only in the Forums & Moderators >> Permissions section of your admin panel. I haven't tried it for the news groups, but it should work.

Yeah, but I wanted to use it so that I could import resources (like from a moderated newsgroup), and give group members the ability to read and discuss them in the forum, without the replies leaving the forum. I looked at the code and it's not a difficult change to do. I'll probably do it and test it over the weekend and post here if anyone is interested.

Jose

[Chris732]

Originally posted by Gardener
Gilby,

I posted before aobut trying to use this hack to download some biniary groups, but I was having trouble with the uuencoded attachments. I've been looking for a way to solve this, and someone sent me here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.base64-decode.php

Would this work? I'm willing to pay for this if you can get it working. PM me with the details.

Thanks

Yes that would be a nice feature Let me know if you find out anything

[Souly]

Originally posted by ryancooper
Hey Guys; great hack!
This is the error I get when I try to post a message?

Posting Message from Ryan C.: 500 What?
Posting Message from Ryan C.: 500 What?
Posting Message from Ryan C.: 500 What?
Posting Message from Ryan C.: 500 What?

What does that mean?

I have the same problem - any Answers?

[efoo]

just installed this hack in order to archive some email lists and it works great - thanks. However, I've got one hurdle to overcome when it comes to automating the run of gateway.php. My board is off-limits to guest users, so trying to execute gateway.php without first logging into the board manually results in a "you are not logged in" page when the script tries to make all the posts. Is there any way to write a cron job that can both log into the forum and run gateway.php (from lynx)?

[efoo]

just installed this hack in order to archive some email lists and it works great - thanks. However, I've got one hurdle to overcome when it comes to automating the run of gateway.php. My board is off-limits to guest users, so trying to execute gateway.php without first logging into the board manually results in a "you are not logged in" page when the script tries to make all the posts. Is there any way to write a cron job that can both log into the forum and run gateway.php (from lynx)?

[Cluster One]

I'm having a bit of trouble.

What i've done is I've installed hamster to pull messages from various newsgroups onto my computer, then setup the addon to download these headers from my pc to the website (Basically my ISP has IP masked access that only allows my IP here to login, but not my websites IP)

My problem is when I run the gateway script, it goes for a few minutes then asks me to download the file? Did i mess something up?

I mean it is actually obtaining the headers and putting them in the forums, its just annoying to get that window.

[MaXxed]

I have a potential issue. I have been running this hack on my forums for a few months now without problems, it has been working excellently.

Today I have found that my news provider has suspended my posting privelages. This may imply that I will need to change providers.

Should I simply change providers (and the settings on the hack) - I am concerned that I will have thousands of duplicate posts on the first sync.

Any idea how I could make the transition painlessly?