NNTP Gateway for Usenet ( Newsgroups ), Mailing Lists

The latest version: V2.3.2 (31 Oct 2004)

What is it?

This hack provides a gateway from vBulletin forums to the USENET. It allows forum members to read newsgroup messages as well as to send posts to the newsgroups. In a nutshell, it turns vBulletin forums into a basic function news reader.

For an added bonus, this package also supports mailing list archive and forum to mailing list gateway. The software retrieves messages from a pop3 account and import them into the forums threaded. It also allows a forums user to send messages to the mailing list by the forum posting interface.

Why?

The gateway will be appreciated by forum members who do not know how to set up a news reader, or people who do not have port 119 open in their network. A forum interface to read and post news are often considered to be better than a news reader.

The gateway adds more contents to your forums and allows the members to interact with wider audience. It is common to see new users signing up to use this feature.

History

This hack is basically a hacked vB2 NNTP gateway written by Gilby to work with vB3. The original hack can be found here:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...7&page=1&pp=15


Features

Some of the features and improvement include:

• Handles both newsgroup posts and mailing lists.
• Handles MIME encoded messages and attachment.
• Handles UUEncoded messages.
• Two Admin Control Panels for all settings.
• Automated installation.
• Correct thread implementation. All imported messages and posts sent to newsgroups will be threaded correctly according to References and Message-ID headers.
• Optional setting to thread by subject for mailing lists that strip references header.
• Supports TABLE_PREFIX.
• Imported messages will be searchable just like normal forum posts.
• Similar threads are built when the messages are imported if the system setting is on.
• Multiple attachments importing.
• Save attachment to database or file according to vB setting.
• Thumbnail created while importing image files.
• Multiple attachment post to newsgroup is also supported.
• Selectable X-No-Archive header honouring system.
• Light on system resources.
• Global Killfile to filter out unwanted messages. Killfiles can have OR and AND effectiveness.
• Strip footer by setting for incoming messages. Strips out repeated message footers.
• Built options to disable signatures and footers for out going messages.

Future development

• AdminCP interfaces. (completed)
• Installation/upgrade script. (completed, coded into AdminCP)
• Traditional "> " lead posting interface.

What do you need and do not need?

You do not need to edit vB php files if you use two bookmarks
You need to edit one vB php file to insert two lines of code if you want direct click links within AdminCP.
No need to run SQL.

Installation

Basically the AdminCP interfaces take care of installation as well as upgrade in the background. Back up your database first. The scripts can modify your database without alerting you!

Please follow the instructions in the readme.txt file for more details.

Support

Please post your support questions to this thread. Please check the FAQ in the third post within this thread first.

================== UPDATES ======================
Jul 31 2004 (release version 2.2.0)

• Provided option of not importing attachments
• Provided option of pause between messages
• Provided option of not sending messages to USENET
• Provided mechanism to skip importing a message if it was crashed on it
• Provided "Default Footer" option
• Provided strip_footer function for mailing lists
  (written originally by KevinM)
• Provided Killfile functions with Header/Body/AND/OR settings
• Provided ability to thread messages by subject for mailing lists
• Provided ability to use a single POP3 account for different mailing lists
  (use prefix)
• Merged KevinM's attachment routine, save thumbnail to hard drive
  as vB3.0.3
• Official support to have the script run by Scheduled Tasks
• Many bug fixes

Please note, when you manually run the script, you must turn on the debug mode. Otherwise nothing will be displayed on the screen.

To run as debug mode: http://forums.yourdomain.com/gateway.php?debug=1

25 Oct 2004

• Provided the option of sending posts using the real email address
• Provided the option of sending posts using a fixed email address for
  each group.
• Posts are now held back if they are in the moderating queue
• Scheduled task log is now working
• Provided the option of sending the debug messages to the vB3 cron log
• Bug fixes

31 Oct 2004

Fixed bugs running the gateway by the vB3 Scheduled Tasks

1 March 2004

Uploaded the new zip file. It contains one or two bug fixes.

[Blackbeard]

Is there anyway this can be added as and extra page in the forum and doesnt effect any form of post counts and forum totals.

The reason i ask is its 50/50 on my forum in keeping it, as some of themembers dont like to see all these posts made by none members,but would like to keep it.

Is there anyway it could be made to stand alone on new vb page.

[dayblue]

Is there anyway to get this to import an .mbox file or anything from a Yahoo group, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks.

[The Prince]

Hi all,

I setup this hack and it half works. I can import messages from th newsgroup but I seem to no be able to post messages to the group. Any idea why this could be happening. And before you ask the variable for posting to usenet is set right.

thanks

[pgrote]

Hey, I had what might be a silly question, but I would really like to have a better understanding of what happened. I was having the same problems that chopperp1 had first stated back on page 20. Which was stated as such:

Originally Posted by chopperp1

Hello to All
I'm trying to get this hack working on company's web server. Everything was pretty much straight forward till I got to the point of running gateway.php. That's what I get:
"...pop3 gateway

Gateway version 2.1.0 1 group(s) gatewayed. Bad User Name!Retrieving Protocol E-mails from the 'dl360mail3.yamner.com' pop3 server ..."

I tripple checked all settings and everything looks good. User account for pop3 is correct including password. Web server talks to mail via local subnet (no filtering there). Can't figure out why this thing can't log in.
any clues? :ermm:

I continued to read along to see if I could find a solution provided. Lierduh continued to help chopperp1 out and trying to find the source of the problem. Finally Lierduh responded with this:

Originally Posted by lierduh

Also try this:

In pop.php around line 108, find:

fwrite($this->pop_connect, $message . "\n");

Change the "\n" to "\r\n"

And it ended up working for chopperp1 and for me as well. My question is, what exactly did that do? What is the difference between "\n" and "\r\n" it is something so small and so simple yet solved my problem, so I was just hoping someone (perhaps lierduh) could give me a better idea of what that does or means?

Thanks again for the great help though, and for any further insight you can give!

[allan grossman]

Lookit this -

http://ebassist.com/vb3/showthread.php?t=21609

The only thing I can figure is giganews' server time is off a bit because my host's time is accurate.

I'm not asking you to fix it, I just thought you'd be a bit amused by it

cheers -

allan

[Princeton]

I've been having some problems in regards to posting to usenet ... eg. none of my posts are being posted to microsoft newsgroup

Is there something that I may be missing here?

I tried the hack above with no success.
I have send_message set to 1.

thank you

[flaregun]

great hack, worked like a charm in 10 minutes.

I have one questiosn - I've tried to ready through this long thread but can't find it - is there a way to remove the double posting when you send a message to the usenet from your forum, it seems that you show your post on the forum and then when the chron job runs you get back your own post from the usenet in the thread. I think that might confuse some of my users.

thanks in advance.

- R

[movielad]

I've finally figured out how to put a correct and valid email address within a post, but not the user's own name. It comes out a bit like:

From: username <username@domain.name>

I'm using $newthread['username'] for the username bit, but if I try to use $vbphrase to try and obtain the user's own name it doesn't work. What should I be using to do this?

Many thanks in advance!

Regards,

Martyn

[Marv]

Originally Posted by movielad

I've finally figured out how to put a correct and valid email address within a post, but not the user's own name.

Hi Martyn,

is this email adress going to the header or the body of the post ? In other words can I reply to the message or do I have to click a mailto:link in the body of the message ?

Beside that - where and how do you get the email adress from the db into the link ? $newthread['username'] should only insert the used nickname but no email adress. May be I?m wrong or got it wrong..

[movielad]

Hi Marv,

The email address is in the headers. I should mention that I cheated - big time! I'm using the LHS side of our company email address for the usernames which makes it much easier to code the email address within the gateway script. Yes, I'd like to be able to pull the email address directly from vBulletin but like the user's name - I'm not sure how to go about doing that.

What I've done already was to amend the following:

 // post it
                if ($grouptype=='news'){
                        $response = $news->post($subject,
                        $group['newsgroup'],
                        "{$newthread['username']} <$msgid>",

to become:

 // post it
                if ($grouptype=='news'){
                        $response = $news->post($subject,
                        $group['newsgroup'],
                        "{$newthread['username']} <{$newthread['username']}@our-domain-name.com>",

Yes, I hard coded the domain, but this could easily be replaced with a variable.

Just need to work out how to get the user's own name in the first bit and we're as good as live

Regards,

Martyn