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).

[Gardener]

Originally Posted by csimo

I'm running VB3. Has anyone tried this on vB3? Will it work, should I try?

Sounds like great work so far!

Been there, tried that, it doesn't work. :ermm:

[petertdavis]

Does anyone have a forum with this hack working? I'd like to see it in action.

[allan grossman]

Originally Posted by petertdavis

Does anyone have a forum with this hack working? I'd like to see it in action.

I do.

http://pointbeing.com

[allan grossman]

Got it threading properly thanks to lierduh's fix.

One small thing, though - look at his code. There are about four instances of

"allowsmili e,showsignature"

and the extra spaces will throw SQL errors if you don't catch them all. I missed two of them and had to go back and edit stuff again but once I got that fixed I replied to a couple posts and checked the threads with Agent - and they showed up in the right spots.

Thanks again, lierduh - I've always liked this hack and you just made it better.

There's only one other problem I've seen and I mentioned it before but the non-RFC-compliant signature separator causes problems for some newsreaders - some of them won't strip the signature out of quoted text because the signature separator isn't quite legal.

If someone is interested in fixing that small issue for their own Usenet gateway, an RFC-compliant signature separator is <linefeed><dash><dash><space><linefeed>

Here's the fix if anyone's interested:

In gateway.php, find both instances of

$signature = "\n--\n";

(line 542 and line 554), and replace with

$signature = "\n-- \n";

Now that I've got those two things fixed the hack's gone from great to awesome. Thanks, gents!

[petertdavis]

Originally Posted by allan grossman

I do.

http://pointbeing.com

Very nice, the usenet posts look like every other post in your forum. Now, how to get it working in version 3.

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by allan grossman

Got it threading properly thanks to lierduh's fix.

One small thing, though - look at his code. There are about four instances of

"allowsmili e,showsignature"

and the extra spaces will throw SQL errors if you don't catch them all. I missed

Looks like the forum has added the extra spaces. When I tried to edit my post and remove the space, they are not there. :ermm:

[allan grossman]

Weird.

I didn't think maybe it could be the forum. Sorry about blaming your code, lierduh.

BTW - thanks for fixing things. This hack is a lot better now that it threads properly

[megarry]

I thried this hack sometime ago and I decided against using it because it setup a new user account for each post received from the NNTP gateway. Does this hack still do that?

If so, is there a way to not setup accounts for each post? I would much rather have the messages come in without user accounts, makes maintaining my user database a bit of a nightmare with thousands of unused accounts.

Dennis

[allan grossman]

Originally Posted by megarry

I thried this hack sometime ago and I decided against using it because it setup a new user account for each post received from the NNTP gateway. Does this hack still do that?

If so, is there a way to not setup accounts for each post? I would much rather have the messages come in without user accounts, makes maintaining my user database a bit of a nightmare with thousands of unused accounts.

Dennis

It doesn't do that now, Dennis. Usenet posts come in under a guest account.

[SRozhon]

I can't find the answer to this...

Originally Posted by Dmitriy

I wonder how I can I exclude the posts in the usenet forusm from being included in the detnew and getdaily searches.

This script downloads a lot of posts from usenet and it confuses many of my members when they want to see new posts since last visit or new posts in the past 24 hours.

Can someone suggest how to hack the search.php to exclude certain forums from being counted towards the latest posts?

Found it! Thank you patvdv on page 23 of this thread