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).

[Erwin]

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

[DaveG]

It seems as if every 3 months my newsgroup gateway blows up on me. It has something to do with my news server rejecting the post, but it ACTUALLY accepts it. Well because on my end it thinks the message was rejected, it sends it again with the next newsgroup sync. And over and over again. with each new message. The only fix for this is to DELETE the newsgroup forum and recreate it from scratch, re-importing all the messages. Then a few months later the same thing happens.

Any idea how to stop this? The people in the newsgroup get REAL mad when it happens because the newsgroup gets flooded with massive duplicate posts.

[Sanjiyan]

Anyone found the solution to the:
POP3: premature NOOP OK, NOT an RFC 1939 Compliant server

because I cant use this hack till I get this resolved... which is a shame, because I like it to pull the email from a email mailing list.

[ScubaClicks]

Great hack and it's downloading the messages from the newsgroups just fine however I'm having problems with posts and replys.

When someone posts or replies it functions normally on the vbulletin side but the posting never seems to make it to the newsgroup itself..

Any ideas or am I missing something?

We cron the group every 10 minutes..

[limey]

Today at 04:52 PM ScubaClicks said this in Post #554
Great hack and it's downloading the messages from the newsgroups just fine however I'm having problems with posts and replys.

When someone posts or replies it functions normally on the vbulletin side but the posting never seems to make it to the newsgroup itself..

Any ideas or am I missing something?

We cron the group every 10 minutes..

I pretty much have the same problem.

Depends on the newserver, but I've tried like 5 and no dice.

[limey]

Ok one worked, don't know which one now.

Can we change the output on the newsgroup page? Like this message was posted with or by or from?

I'm leaving my post as is, so others may find the answer. The solution is in this thread

[groovesalad]

oops, no I didn't. I uploaded it and it says this

1 group(s) gatewayed.
Logging in to news.comcast.giganews.com, group alt.music.dave-matthews

but nothing shows up in the forum

[limey]

Does anyone have this hack installed as well as vbHome Lite? If so are the new posts from the newsgroups being updated on the front page?

[limey]

Does anyone have this hack installed as well as vbHome Lite? If so are the new posts from the newsgroups being updated on the front page?

[groovesalad]

So, no one knows why it doesn't get past the gateway section and not post on the board?