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).

[allan grossman]

woohoo!

Good on you, bitg. I'm glad you got it fixed.

[PhoenixBB]

Thank you Allan, those instructions made much more sense.

From a terminal window type "man diff" (no quotes) and smack the enter key. Use the spacebar to scroll down and the "q" key to quit. Lotsa good stuff there. "diff --help" will give you the short version.

Mwuahahaha I've no idea what a terminal window is. I tried the MSDos prompt out of curiosity, that looks like a 'terminal' thing, but of course I got 'bad command'.

So this is all from Linux eh? Might as well be Chinese for some of us. Think I better read that link you gave if I plan on doing any more hacks. What's the betting I end up with a blank look on my face. <snerk>

The gateway appears to be working ok, but my main problem now is making sure it strips the vbcode properly on the outgoing.

Always seems to leave some of the color codes in which look weird in the newsgroup.

Thanx for your help. Couldn't have figured this without ya.

Phoe

[PhoenixBB]

Allan, you've commented out the mime.php instead of the class.pop3.php. I assume this is an accident and the mime isn't supposed to be commented out?

Thanx!

[allan grossman]

Originally Posted by PhoenixBB

Allan, you've commented out the mime.php instead of the class.pop3.php. I assume this is an accident and the mime isn't supposed to be commented out?

Thanx!

Oops.

I fixed it.

Thanks!

[allan grossman]

Originally Posted by PhoenixBB

Thank you Allan, those instructions made much more sense.

Mwuahahaha I've no idea what a terminal window is. I tried the MSDos prompt out of curiosity, that looks like a 'terminal' thing, but of course I got 'bad command'.

So this is all from Linux eh? Might as well be Chinese for some of us. Think I better read that link you gave if I plan on doing any more hacks. What's the betting I end up with a blank look on my face. <snerk>

The gateway appears to be working ok, but my main problem now is making sure it strips the vbcode properly on the outgoing.

Always seems to leave some of the color codes in which look weird in the newsgroup.

Thanx for your help. Couldn't have figured this without ya.

I didn't know you were running Windows, Phoenix - the "man diff" probably didn't make any sense at all

Glad to be of service, though.

[Holidazed]

Allan, I am now getting the following error when synchronizing (only if a post is due to go out from my system).
________________
1 group(s) gatewayed.
200 NewsRave v1.01 (posting ok)
381 More authentication needed
281 Ok
211 17410 962764 980173 rec.games.frp.dnd Logging in to news-west.newscene.com, group rec.games.frp.dnd
340 340 <3f6fa158$0$99022$45beb828@newscene.com> (desired)
240 Article posted!Posting Message from DK:
240 Article posted!
220 980173 <3F6FCAE7.127B@cox.net> articleGetting message number 980173: New thread; 'Value of captured spellbooks?' from Werebat
________________

Obviously some of that is messages received. Where is says "381 More Authentication needed" is confusing me. My outbound message is being posted and it recieves messages.

What is it authenticating?

[allan grossman]

I looked up the error number -

381 is a password request from the server. Everything's working fine - what you're seeing is normal authentication.

[Holidazed]

OK, I was just confused. Thank you for your help.

[limey]

A nice addon would be to add an email obfuscator to the script so that emails that get printed via yoursite are not tried on on your email server by spam bots.

should be easy to impliment.

[allan grossman]

Originally Posted by limey

A nice addon would be to add an email obfuscator to the script so that emails that get printed via yoursite are not tried on on your email server by spam bots...

Hmmmm.

I may play with that a little. My mail server's getting hammered (well, not really but spam traffic is up) and I'd rather change the email domain to something that can't be resolved.