NNTP Gateway for Usenet ( Newsgroups ), Mailing Lists

The latest version: V2.3.2 (31 Oct 2004)

What is it?

This hack provides a gateway from vBulletin forums to the USENET. It allows forum members to read newsgroup messages as well as to send posts to the newsgroups. In a nutshell, it turns vBulletin forums into a basic function news reader.

For an added bonus, this package also supports mailing list archive and forum to mailing list gateway. The software retrieves messages from a pop3 account and import them into the forums threaded. It also allows a forums user to send messages to the mailing list by the forum posting interface.

Why?

The gateway will be appreciated by forum members who do not know how to set up a news reader, or people who do not have port 119 open in their network. A forum interface to read and post news are often considered to be better than a news reader.

The gateway adds more contents to your forums and allows the members to interact with wider audience. It is common to see new users signing up to use this feature.

History

This hack is basically a hacked vB2 NNTP gateway written by Gilby to work with vB3. The original hack can be found here:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...7&page=1&pp=15


Features

Some of the features and improvement include:

• Handles both newsgroup posts and mailing lists.
• Handles MIME encoded messages and attachment.
• Handles UUEncoded messages.
• Two Admin Control Panels for all settings.
• Automated installation.
• Correct thread implementation. All imported messages and posts sent to newsgroups will be threaded correctly according to References and Message-ID headers.
• Optional setting to thread by subject for mailing lists that strip references header.
• Supports TABLE_PREFIX.
• Imported messages will be searchable just like normal forum posts.
• Similar threads are built when the messages are imported if the system setting is on.
• Multiple attachments importing.
• Save attachment to database or file according to vB setting.
• Thumbnail created while importing image files.
• Multiple attachment post to newsgroup is also supported.
• Selectable X-No-Archive header honouring system.
• Light on system resources.
• Global Killfile to filter out unwanted messages. Killfiles can have OR and AND effectiveness.
• Strip footer by setting for incoming messages. Strips out repeated message footers.
• Built options to disable signatures and footers for out going messages.

Future development

• AdminCP interfaces. (completed)
• Installation/upgrade script. (completed, coded into AdminCP)
• Traditional "> " lead posting interface.

What do you need and do not need?

You do not need to edit vB php files if you use two bookmarks
You need to edit one vB php file to insert two lines of code if you want direct click links within AdminCP.
No need to run SQL.

Installation

Basically the AdminCP interfaces take care of installation as well as upgrade in the background. Back up your database first. The scripts can modify your database without alerting you!

Please follow the instructions in the readme.txt file for more details.

Support

Please post your support questions to this thread. Please check the FAQ in the third post within this thread first.

================== UPDATES ======================
Jul 31 2004 (release version 2.2.0)

• Provided option of not importing attachments
• Provided option of pause between messages
• Provided option of not sending messages to USENET
• Provided mechanism to skip importing a message if it was crashed on it
• Provided "Default Footer" option
• Provided strip_footer function for mailing lists
  (written originally by KevinM)
• Provided Killfile functions with Header/Body/AND/OR settings
• Provided ability to thread messages by subject for mailing lists
• Provided ability to use a single POP3 account for different mailing lists
  (use prefix)
• Merged KevinM's attachment routine, save thumbnail to hard drive
  as vB3.0.3
• Official support to have the script run by Scheduled Tasks
• Many bug fixes

Please note, when you manually run the script, you must turn on the debug mode. Otherwise nothing will be displayed on the screen.

To run as debug mode: http://forums.yourdomain.com/gateway.php?debug=1

25 Oct 2004

• Provided the option of sending posts using the real email address
• Provided the option of sending posts using a fixed email address for
  each group.
• Posts are now held back if they are in the moderating queue
• Scheduled task log is now working
• Provided the option of sending the debug messages to the vB3 cron log
• Bug fixes

31 Oct 2004

Fixed bugs running the gateway by the vB3 Scheduled Tasks

1 March 2004

Uploaded the new zip file. It contains one or two bug fixes.

[Chadi]

Do you know of any free ones?

[James T Brock]

No, unfortunately I don't. Though I'm sure that if you search Google for "free NNTP usenet" you'll find some. Here's one I found a few days ago: http://news.individual.net

They're free. I registered with them to use as a backup news server. They need to manually set-up your account, I registered a few days ago and haven't heard back from them yet.

[mcncyo]

anyway of making it use the quote system when they are qutoing in the newserver? For example it does this

>Lets look at what the
>word of God has to say. This is going to be a series of posts but
>today lets start with first Corinthians.

and i want it to do something like this

Lets look at what the
word of God has to say. This is going to be a series of posts but
today lets start with first Corinthians.

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by mcncyo

anyway of making it use the quote system when they are qutoing in the newserver? For example it does this

>Lets look at what the
>word of God has to say. This is going to be a series of posts but
>today lets start with first Corinthians.

and i want it to do something like this

In the feature release, I intend to use the traditional Usenet way of quoting, which is ">" etc. It will be much easier to reply a post without insert all the BB codes for each quote tags.

It is technically possible to convert ">"s into Quotes, but people do use other type of prefix for quotes on Usenet. ...and also, you may end up with too many level of quotes if the posts contain ">>>>>>>>".

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by James T Brock

Ok..this is frustrating, everything is working except now I can import posts fine but none of my posts are being submitted to usenet!

Is there anything I can do to fix this? Maybe something in my settings wasn't done right? For organization I have my domain name and I have this for the email; "no-mx.forums.MyDomain.com"

With MyDomain being my sites real domain. is that corrent, or should the syntax be emailAddress@mydomain.com?

This setting will not affect the functionality. The reason I added no-mx is to avoid your email servers getting hit with all the spam attempts.

Your problem is probably caused by the server not letting you to post.

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by trackpads

Thanks!

Is there a way to prefix the usenet posts so people can tell which ones are local and which ones arent?

If not no biggie,

Thanks again for all the hard work,

-Jason

It is perhaps easier to educate the users to identify them by looking at the user name, to see if it is clickable.

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by michaelgersitz

I really proboally should look for the answer in this thread since it is proboally listed, but I looked through 10 pages and could not see a similar problem.

The USENET posts post only once, but in my statistics box on teh main page, it doubles the amount of posts by all the posts in my rec.gambling.poker forum.

http://www.goodpokerforums.com/ is my forum.

If the script failed on you in the past. You may need to reset the counter using the vB adminCP.

[James T Brock]

I got my webhost to open port 119 for outgoing but my posts still aren't propagating to usenet. I logged in to my host via telnet and went to news.giganews.com on port 119. I was able to read posts *and* submit posts to usenet without any problems. Doesn't that mean that port 119 is open for outgoing traffic and I should be able to post from my forum???

I would like to try something else. Could I connect to giganews.com from another port, such as port 80 and post and read messages? if I wanted to do that, where would I find the 119 in the script and change it? I checked nntp.php and gateway.php and saw one instance of port 119 in each, would that be all that is required to connect via port 80 instead of 119?

[theispreport]

Awesome script. I am setting it up to reply to a mailing list, is it possible to have the script always email out with the same email address?

Example: forumuser <permuser@domain.com>

forumuser will change but the email will not.

Thanks

[esfron]

Runned .../gateway.php?debug=1 on 2.2.1 with a fresh install 3.0.3.

I can import but none of my posts are being submitted to usenet. I got the following database error. Setting: lastpostid: 0 before running.

Database error in vBulletin 3.0.3:

Invalid SQL: UPDATE nntp_settings
SET value =
WHERE varname = 'last_postid'
mysql error: You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'WHERE varname = 'last_postid'' at line 3

mysql error number: 1064

Date: Friday 22nd of October 2004 12:15:08 AM
Script: http://www.xxxxxxxx/gateway.php?debug=1
Referer:
Username: Unregistered
IP Address: 6xxxxxxxxxx

Thank you for your time.

Log following:

Gateway version 2.2.1  1 group(s) gatewayed.

Connecting to server, server says: 200 SurgeNews News-west.u (Version 1.0a-7) http://surgenews.com posting OK

Server responded after user name: 381 Helo xxxxxx password required

Server responded after password: 281 Authorization accepted

Info for europa.test at spamkiller.usenet.com:
211 8 2676 2783 europa.test selected

Getting message number 2677: 
'alt.bananas,vegas.motss,be.politics,europa.test,alt.support' from anna parker. New thread.
Getting message number 2678: 
'Re: > > > > matt parker alias jeff@yahoo.com matt parker alias t dchenka@yahoo.com matt parker alias erik vonlindtherzog@yahoo.com matt parker alias eriklint@yahoo.com the dismissed university employees suffered financial loss due to matt parker matt' from anna parker. New thread.
Getting message number 2702: 
'Re: erik van lint ++++ for brains child molester chessbase thief aka e lunsen kuleuven erik van lint alias erick vanlunsen herzog child molester chessbase thief aka e lunsen kuleuven erik van lint is a stinking piece of ++++ that steals likes child p' from Erik Van Lint  E Lunsen. New thread.
Getting message number 2736: 
'Re: all personals at trueloves.com are fake and the whole site sucks' from matthew parker. New thread.
Getting message number 2780: 
'ignore' from Pedro Graca. New thread.
Getting message number 2781: 
'ignore' from Pedro Graca. New thread.
Getting message number 2782: 
'last ignore test' from Pedro Graca. New thread.
Getting message number 2783: 
'distr. test' from Patrick Ahrer. New thread.
<html><head><title>Forums Database Error</title><style type="text/css"><!--.error { font: 11px tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; }--></style></head>
<body></table></td></tr></table></form>
<blockquote><p class="error">&nbsp;</p><p class="error"><b>There seems to have been a slight problem with the Forums database.</b><br />
Please try again by pressing the <a href="javascript:window.location=window.location;">refresh</a> button in your browser.</p><p class="error">An E-Mail has been dispatched to our <a href="mailto:xxxxxxxxxxxxx">Technical Staff</a>, who you can also contact if the problem persists.</p><p class="error">We apologise for any inconvenience.</p></blockquote>

<!--
Database error in vBulletin 3.0.3:

Invalid SQL: UPDATE nntp_settings
		SET value = 
		WHERE varname = 'last_postid'
mysql error: You have an error in your SQL syntax.  Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'WHERE varname = 'last_postid'' at line 3

mysql error number: 1064

Date: Friday 22nd of October 2004 12:15:08 AM
Script: xxxxxxx/gateway.php?debug=1
Referer: 
Username: Unregistered
IP Address: xxxx
 -->

</body></html>