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).

[groovesalad]

.

[limey]

groovesalad...yes i do. you need to get with an appropriate server. one that reads and posts. the free ones are hard to find and are all sketchy. I have not been able to find one that reads and posts and I don't want to get a commercial one.

btw I listen to ur station all the time.

[mood]

Gilby,

Totally stumped why I cannot get the mail list gateway section to work.

Do you have a working "class.POP3.php" sample you could PM me?

BIG Thanks!

Mood

[mood]

Got the mail list feature to work (didn't realize that you had to setup the mail account as a news group in nntp_groups)

Next question: HOW to avoid the circular effect when wanting to sync forum/nntp/mail list.

anybody any ideas?
Thanks
Mood

[limey]

Cancel that its working. Different newsgroups must have different message ID's because I changed that and it worked.

Tried using newsranger and its not working.

[mr.children]

how come i am getting those errors?
please...tell me, i have installed everyhintg

Warning: main(class.POP3.php3) [function.main]: failed to create stream: No such file or directory in /home/virtual/site13/fst/var/www/html/bbs/gateway.php on line 25

Warning: main(class.POP3.php3) [function.main]: failed to create stream: No such file or directory in /home/virtual/site13/fst/var/www/html/bbs/gateway.php on line 25

Warning: main() [function.main]: Failed opening 'class.POP3.php3' for inclusion (include_path='.:/php/includes:/usr/share/php') in /home/virtual/site13/fst/var/www/html/bbs/gateway.php on line 25

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/virtual/site13/fst/var/www/html/bbs/gateway.php:25) in /home/virtual/site13/fst/var/www/html/bbs/gateway.php on line 483
1 group(s) gatewayed. Could not connect to NNTP-serverLogging in to newsgroup.server, group your.newsgroup Not connectedNot connected

btw, what does setlastmsg.php for?

[allan grossman]

Outstanding hack, Gilby - running fine on a clean vB 2.3.0 install.

I did have a small problem with cron jobs not running properly if I redirected stderr and stdout to /dev/null but I fixed that by writing the output to a log file instead.

Can someone help this php n00b tweak the signature function a little?

Instead of appending the username and custom title, what I'd like is *nothing* if the user doesn't have a signature, the user's signature appended to the post if he does, and instead of thread and profile links maybe something under the dashed line like "this post was gatewayed through the forum at http://pointbeing.com"

No big deal, but if someone could knock something like that out for me in a couple minutes it'd be greatly appreciated. Here's the signature section of gateway.php - I don't really need the "unregistered user" section as unregistered users can't post.

PHP Code:

        // get user's signature
        if ($newthread[userid]){
            $get_userinfo=$DB_site->query("SELECT signature,usertitle,customtitle FROM user WHERE userid=$newthread[userid] LIMIT 1");
            $userinfo=$DB_site->fetch_array($get_userinfo);
            $signature = "\n--\n";
            $signature .= $newthread[username];
            if ($userinfo[customtitle]){ $signature .= " - $userinfo[usertitle]"; }
            if ($userinfo[signature]){
                $signature .= "\n\n";
                $signature .= format_text($userinfo[signature]);
            }
            $signature .= "\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n";
            $signature .= "$newthread[username]'s Profile: $settings[profileurl]$newthread[userid]\n";
            $signature .= "View this thread: $settings[threadurl]$newthread[threadid]\n";
        } else {
            $userinfo = false;
            $signature = "\n--\n".$newthread[username]." - Unregistered User";
            $signature .= "\n------------------------------------------------------------------------\n";
            $signature .= "View this thread: $settings[threadurl]$newthread[threadid]\n";
        } 


Thanks in advance

[allan grossman]

Never mind, I fixed it

[PhoenixBB]

Quoting from post 381:

my searchindex table started getting out of hand... It reached about a gig, and I was only a quarter done, so I killed all the records and set the nntp options to not index the groups that are based on newsgroups and only index local groups.... now that that is done, my whole dbase is arround 40 meg as of may 22, but should be around 80 or so when done!...

This is the only post I can find on this. Where are these NNTP options? I've looked in the php file but saw nothing there, so anyone know how I can exclude the newsgroups from the search function/index?

I'm shortly going to be adding the code to ensure that newsgroup posts aren't included in normal 'view new' so will that be all that's needed or do I need to do more?

Installed this and the interface without problems, but I haven't run it yet.

Also, I have attachments switched off on the board and I'm just using a couple of text groups. I'm using the interface so will that automatically not download attachments, or will they just be put into the database and not displayed on the board. If so how can I ensure it doesn't download binaries?

I'm on a shared server and my host has been really encouraging to me re installing this hack. Don't want to push my luck by having the database grow massively.

Thanks for any help.

[PhoenixBB]

Quoting from post 381:

my searchindex table started getting out of hand... It reached about a gig, and I was only a quarter done, so I killed all the records and set the nntp options to not index the groups that are based on newsgroups and only index local groups.... now that that is done, my whole dbase is arround 40 meg as of may 22, but should be around 80 or so when done!...

This is the only post I can find on this. Where are these NNTP options? I've looked in the php file but saw nothing there, so anyone know how I can exclude the newsgroups from the search function/index?

I'm shortly going to be adding the code to ensure that newsgroup posts aren't included in normal 'view new' so will that be all that's needed or do I need to do more?

Installed this and the interface without problems, but I haven't run it yet.

Also, I have attachments switched off on the board and I'm just using a couple of text groups. I'm using the interface so will that automatically not download attachments, or will they just be put into the database and not displayed on the board. If so how can I ensure it doesn't download binaries?

I'm on a shared server and my host has been really encouraging to me re installing this hack. Don't want to push my luck by having the database grow massively.

Thanks for any help.