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]

gopherhockey,

I even set it up so posts going to my forums via NNTP are not counted in the rest of my vb systems statistics, so users aren't flooded with usenet garbage when they log in, but only see actual posts from local (registered) users.

can you tell us exactly what you did to stop that ?

[JF1980]

look up

[JF1980]

Im running 2.2.6 (not sure if that matters), I setup a test box and added this hack to it. It sucks posts in ok, but posts made to the newsgroup do not appear on the groups. Is this a knowsn problem, it's making me mad!!!

Take a look, http://jf.myftp.org the forums is called TEST under the General Forums

[Gardener]

After you post the reply, go into your admin control panel and click on "Manual Syncronisation". What does the screen say? Are you getting any error messages? I'm using it on my new site and don't have any problems.

[JF1980]

It says it is posted ok!

Im using ultrafeed news server if that is important...

[Gardener]

I could be the news service you use. I have seen some that will take several hours for a post to show up after it was made.

Gilby set up a test server here that you can use to make sure that everything is working. Try that and see if the posts show up.

[MaXxed]

Ive been having issues with my news provider over spam messages being posted to usenet thru my board. Do you guys moderate your outgoing posts? Does it work well with the hack?

[tpearl5]

I can't get past gateway.php connecting to the server. It doesn't import or export messages at all. I've read throught his thread as much as possible, what can be missing?

[Gardener]

Today at 12:37 AM tpearl5 said this in Post #528
I can't get past gateway.php connecting to the server. It doesn't import or export messages at all. I've read throught his thread as much as possible, what can be missing?

What news server are you using? Are you getting any error messages? If you are trying to use your ISP's news server they may have it set so that it will not accept connections from outside the network.

Try the test server posted here and see if you can connect to it. If you can, then it's your news provider.

If you still can't get it working, PM me and I'll see if I can help.

[JF1980]

Ok, I sort of have this working. Few questions:

1. Is there a way of making the reply address the same for any user (e.g. usenet@thrill-seekers.net) and then having a cron job checking this account every x mins and then importing any replies to threads into the newsgroup forum? Im sure someone must have done this already.

2. Have a weird issue, I post to free.teranews.com, in outlook express I can't see my posts on either teranews.com or ultrafeed.com servers but they show up on my ISP's server?!? Can anyone see a post on rec.aviation.hang-gliding ?

3. How regularly can I have a cron job running gateway.php without making the server slow down to a halt and being thrown out by my host (powweb)? 5mins, 10mins? If you want to see the size of the newsgroups I will be using then take a look at http://jf.myftp.org (my test box). I guess I will have about 6-7 other groups on my live site all of similar size.

4. What is the best way to stop my DB going over my 250MB server disk limit? I guess I should clear out posts once they are 30 days old or so, VBAdmin doesn't do this so I guess I will have to run a cron job, are there any good scripts already out there for this purpose?

Thanks.

Justin