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).

[recumbent615]

I have attempted to read through these for anyone seeing the same issue but for some reason I keep getting the "minimum word length 3" error... and I may have missed a post or two in this long thread so I'm sorry if this has been addressed.

I'm using this hack to gateway a mailing list, works nice, but I have been seeing a few odd things in the gatewayed posts. here is one:

I see in my gatewayed forum a post that came from email that looks like this :

 # Exim filter <<=3D=3D do not edit or remove this line!
if
$domain does not contains backup and
${original_local_part} is not "root"
then
unseen deliver \

${local_part_prefix}${original_local_part}$local_p
art_suffix@backup1.$domai=
n
endif


and this is the first router:

#this router does a system level per recipient filtering
#essentially just copying the file to a backup address
# user =3D smmsp
central_filter:
driver =3D redirect
address_data =3D $sender_address
errors_to =3D root@humph.com
# user =3D root
check_local_user
domains =3D +local_domains
local_parts =3D !lsearch;/etc/mail/domains/${domain}.no_backup
file =3D /usr/local/exim/confs/filters/$local_part
no_verify
allow_filter
allow_freeze

Why the "3D" every where there is an "=" sign

and also the "=" at the end of the second line below does not exist in the original message.

${local_part_prefix}${original_local_part}$local_p
art_suffix@backup1.$domai=
n

and that was all one line in the email not three...

the URL is: www.exim-users.org incase you want to take a look at the resulting posts.

Any Ideas?

Kevin

[Gilby]

Originally Posted by recumbent615

I have attempted to read through these for anyone seeing the same issue but for some reason I keep getting the "minimum word length 3" error... and I may have missed a post or two in this long thread so I'm sorry if this has been addressed.

What's the actual error that it spits out? It should say what line it's on. Is this error showing when running the gateway script? That sounds like the error you'd get if you try doing a search in the forum and the word has less than 3 characters.

As for your other problem, sounds like the original email is encoded and the script is not parsing it correctly. More info would be needed to solve it, such as the original message in raw form, complete with headers.

- Gilby

[recumbent615]

Gilby,

I'll save off the next few days of messages so I can find one that is not working ... the search error was just the standard error message when your search list is not long enough . Not an error, just an explanation as to why I was asking a question that may have been asked before.

Kevin

Any SQL wizards out there able to tell me how to do a subsitution from inside a post? I'd love to run a sql command to replace the "=3D" with "=" in every post.

[recumbent615]

Gilby,

You will be happy to hear that the problem is out side the scope of the NNTP gateway Hack. After looking closely at the incoming messages in the mailbox I see that some of them are already malformed in the way that they show up in the fourms. So the import is working just fine. I believe that this is being caused by either the client or mailman in doing a 8bit to 7bit conversion. But I will need to look at more malformed messages to determine what the problem is. So for now I will continue to import them as is, but it would be nice if I could fix the problem via sql if it is at all possible.

Kevin

[limey]

Since the RC is out should I wait or try and fumble installing this hack now?

[allan grossman]

I've got it running on RC2 - no problems.

[limey]

Allan: two things: does the graphical interface work still? And....are you using the gateway.php that was recently posted or the one in post 1?

thanks.

[allan grossman]

The graphical interface doesn't work in vB3. No biggie, though - the information's stored in the database. I didn't even have to edit it

You have to use the gateway.php that's on page 44. All I did was edit the signature routines a little to suit personal preferences and away it went. I'm running the cron job every hour just to make sure it works - I've posted through the interface and it appears to work just fine.

I upgraded to RC3 today - no problems.

[Bro_Joey_Gowdy]

Im getting several errors mainly concerning the vBprefix code:: Could someone please make this an official release within the vB3 Mod. forums ?


Database error in vBulletin 3.0.0 Release Candidate 3:

Invalid SQL: SELECT varname,value FROM nntp_settings
mysql error: Table 'a51834.nntp_settings' doesn't exist

mysql error number: 1146

Date: Thursday 22nd of January 2004 06:32:40 PM
Script: http://www.joeygowdy.com/forum/gateway.php
Referer:
Username: Bro_Joey_Gowdy
IP Address:

[lierduh]

My patched gateway.php on page 44 would not work with table prefix. It should not be hard to implement though. I think I will clean it up when the full release is out (if Gilby does not release the official version).