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).

[Marv]

Oups..forgotten: does anybody know if this hack works with the 3.0 RC3 ?

Thx,
Marv.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by MaXxed
2. How does this hack handle outgoing attachments? I have them disabled by default as I am using text groups, but I am curious what would happen.

It'll post a URL to the file on your server.

[Gilby]

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

That won't work. The script currently supports mime encoded attachments but doe snot support uuencoded attachements.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by 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.

If you go the email route, just set it up to pull the messages from teh pop server and then send the messages to a "dump" address (where it'll be deleted and not delivered). Or just comment out the lines that sends out the email or newsgroup post.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by 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)?

You might be able to create a dummy account and then just set the username and password as variables in teh gateway script so that whenever the gateway script is run it'll use that username and pass.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by 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.

Sounds like you have your web browser set up incorrectly so that it won't display text files in teh browser window, but instead prompts you to save it.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by 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?

You need to get the message id number of the last post on your new server, which is unique to each news server and set it in the msgid column so that it'll pull starting from there.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Gardener
Well, I can get it to work on my ISP's POP3 account, but not on the POP3 accounts on my server. I'm still trying to find out how to fix this.

What mail server do you have?

[Gilby]

Originally posted by qnx
is this hack dead?
I noticed the author (Gilby) hadn't said a word in the forum for more than three months.
Lots of questions/suggestions left unanswered.

I've been busy working on other projects. Sorry about putting this hack on the back burner.

[Gilby]

Originally posted by gopherhockey
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.

A sticky thread will work normally (but of course wont be sticky on the news server). To post to the forums and not have it go to the newsgroup, you'll need to make the post and then change the value in the post table to make the gateway script think it was already sent by changing the "isusenetpost" column to 1 for that post.