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).

[Sanjiyan]

works with both 2.2.9 and 2.3.0

works with both 2.2.9 and 2.3.0

I've been using this nntp hack since gilby originally made it, and its worked with every vbulletin since 2.2.3

[Sanjiyan]

04-08-03 at 06:41 PM peterjun said this in Post #537
Is there a way to show the poster's email address in the forum post? Perhaps at the start of the message?

"From <email here>"

Thanks!

Also, how do I disable sends from the forum to the newsgroups?

The email one I dont know, but to stop your board from sending posts onto usenet, just set up the access masks to allow people to view the posts or threads, but not post/reply/create etc.

[Sanjiyan]

03-26-03 at 08:22 PM JF1980 said this in Post #530
[B]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.

For the email you can try this, you need to edit a entry in the database, in the table: nntp_settings

The title is: Email address domain

Change the value: timelimit.yourserver.com
To what ever you need, I dont know if this works 100% but by the look of it, and what the description of it says, it should do.

As for the cron job, I do it a simple way and use MS Task scheduler, just point it to iexplorer.exe (or what ever browser) like this:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://theborg.cjb.net/borg/forums/gateway.php

The above is all one line, you can see if it works via wacking it in your RUN command line from the Start Menu (for us Windows users)

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.

Have it as often as you like, I have it every 20 minutes.

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?

Use the Search system


Thanks

[Sanjiyan]

04-08-03 at 04:34 PM MaXxed said this in Post #536
I have my usenet forums moderated on all posts, yet the script is posting messages to usenet anyway. How can I avoid spamming usenet? I've asked this question before but am now stumped, any help anyone?

See my post above, or click on this link

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...862#post386862

[Sanjiyan]

04-01-03 at 03:55 PM SRozhon said this in Post #532
When I do Manual Sync all goes fine but if put address in browser I get a promt box to save or open gateway.php??? When I say open I get an error and it opens notepad. Why would this be happening?

Its your IE settings you need to reset them and it should work.

[peterjun]

works under 2.3.0 for me.

[Sanjiyan]

I've recently changed servers, and I am now getting this error when I try and pick up POP3 posts:

POP3: premature NOOP OK, NOT an RFC 1939 Compliant server

The only thing that is different is the server environment, ie its a different webserver.

Any ideas on how to fix this, so I can use the POP3 function again and feed my mailing lists to the forums?

[Erwin]

Any tricks or advice regarding avoiding the gateway.php from timing out when importing a large amount of posts?

I notice that some users have figured a way to do this. Any suggestions?

[Sanjiyan]

increasin the timeout in php.ini ?

[Erwin]

It's okay, I got around it by using another news server.