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).

[nuno]

Originally posted by Gilby


You shouldn't get that error, unless the php installation you are using is running in safe mode, which is likely the case for you. Anyways, you'll need to log into your newsgrop server with another news program and find the id of the message you want to start from and enter that number in the database under the lastmsg column. The number can be found in the header of the message at the end of the Xref line.

I'm getting timeouts too.
PHP is not running in safe mode.
If i change the lastmsg column field in db and re-run gateway.php all i get is a DNS error, a file not found error.

[nuno]

Originally posted by Gardener


You are never going to get it downloaded. It's just too much. I tried downloading php.general on a test server here at home with a P4 and 1 gig of ram and it choked on the amount of data. There are just too many posts there to download them all. Your best bet is to go back about 6 months and get a post number and enter that number for the last post number.

heheh done.
Grabbed 30k posts, all at once, and no connection timeout, you just have to fool the browser.

[Tigga]

d

[gopherhockey]

This hack absolutely rocks. By far this is going to add more functionality to our forums than anything I've seen.

Thank you, thank you THANK YOU!!!

INSTALL............... :banana:

[gopherhockey]

I apologize if this has already been answered here, but this thread is getting long and my searches resulted in no answers.

What I would like to do is have the ability to post a sticky thread into the forum without that one being sent out to the related usenet newsgroup.

I guess this becomes a 2 part question:

1. Can you post a sticky thread and will that screw up the system?

2. Is there a way to post in my forum and not have it be sent out to the public.

(I tried running the setlastmsg thing, but that seems to only work on incoming, not outgoing)

Thanks!

[Schorsch]

edit: sorry for double posting!

[Schorsch]

great hack!! :bunny: some questions:

how can I leave out the signatures and user titles when posting to a group ?

edit: and how can I change the quote color ?

and when I look into a thread I can't see the poster name, always just "guest"

[SRozhon]

Originally posted by nuno


heheh done.
Grabbed 30k posts, all at once, and no connection timeout, you just have to fool the browser.

Can I ask How did you do this? Mine always timesout. I love this script though.

Another question--I'd like to be able to delete the posts without opening them up first (sometimes I can tell what is spam or unrelated to the topic without opening them) and since I edit the garbage out this would make things much easier. Is there a way?

Question 3:
Is there a way to not include the previous replies, etc. that show up under the users post? A lot of times it is just the same thing over and over in each persons post--and this just seams to take up space. Just wondering... Thanks!

[Schorsch]

I have another important question:

How can I exclude the newsgroups forums from the search function ??????

[Marv]

First - it?s a really great hack so far and I want to thank the author for sharing it with us.

But as Schorsch mentioned before - most people in serious newsgroups are not very amused by the produced signature.
Couldn?t there be a way that this hack reads out the mail-adress from the database and takes that as signature ? May be like

Contact: emailadress@poster.com
---
posted via NNTP-gateway through http://board.yourdomain.com
Abuse: abuse@yourdomain.com

Not at least I would aprecciate that the mailadress of the poster is his own. Actual the poster-adress in those ng-postings is set to "membername.12345@yourdomain.com - and that?s far from beeing neat if you have a <catchall>-mailfunction running on your domains - never had that much spam before... :surprised: <args>

And beside that other ng-users can calm down.. - actual it?s really producing lots of trouble...

Just my two thoughts - but I think it?s really important.

Marv.