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).

[himerus]

Its Working!!! Yay

[kkiely]

what does it mean when it says " Run the SQL provided in nntp.sql.". I am a newbie , how do i do this?

[Ogmuk]

Originally Posted by kkiely

what does it mean when it says " Run the SQL provided in nntp.sql.". I am a newbie , how do i do this?

It will be a bit hard to explain when you are very new to this but do you know what phpMyAdmin is, and if so, do you have it installed on your server?

[kkiely]

<phpadmin>

I go through Powweb and they have something called. phpadmin.powwebcom - when i log onto there it looks like it shows all the database tables and stuff

[kkiely]

OK, i just ran the SQL file and it appears to have created the nntp tables I need. Now on steps 3 & 4:

<< "3. Go into your database and modify the settings in the nntp_settings table. Descriptions are available in there, but currently it's not integrated with the vB admin control panel." >>

What specifically do I need to do here?

<< 4. Go in and set up your newsgroups in the nntp_groups table.
Basically you just need the newsgroup field defined, the forum defined as the number associated with the forum (warning: all posts currently in there will be exported, so be careful), >>

What specifically do I need to do here?

<< and the server of your newsgroup provider (ie. news.xyz.com). >>

What specifically do I need to do here?

[himerus]

3.) You must use your PHPmyAdmin, or other similar database tool to access the database, and edit the nntp_settings table, and change the value filed to match what you would like. See attachment for settings after I have changed them to match my forum.

4.) In the nntp_groups table, this is where you are going to store the info for the newsgroups you choose to gateway. See the attached image to see what my table looks like after inserting several newsgroups. username & password deleted out obviously.

LAST: you must have a valid newsgroup account with an ISP, or an independant newsgroup provider. I use both Easynews (Read my Review of Easynews) and Teranews (http://www.teranews.com/) as my providers. The teranews account is doing most of the traffic, and I will move all the accounts to easynews once I am sure the system will not cause any problems.

Some newsgroups, you may have to turn on posting on your account in order to be able to post...

I've done a huge hack of the original hack to get this to work for my situation, and it seems to be working properly now... I still have a lot of adjustments to make, and then I will create my own integration into the admincp if the original author hasn't released a new version yet.

There is a lot of great features that could be put into this....

I plan on some further options when setting up newsgroups of how many posts you would like to download, all, specific number, or new posts only.

I would like to put in something that if you have deleted a thread from your forum, and there are later replies to it, that you have the option to either download them, or ignore them, and move on.

This is a great addition to any forum that has newsgroups that are similiar in topic and nature. If you can have some moderators just for that forum to delete spam, porn, and other garbage that gets posted to some of the unmoderated high-traffic groups, then you will add tons of valuable content to your site for nothing more than the cost of a newsgroup account (if you don't already have one)



Hope that helps... just ask any specifics you have on making this work with vB3, because I seemed to have a lot more problems to work through than some of the others in this thread that have it running on vb3... but I figured them all out eventually, and with some added scripts, and classes, it seems to be working great.

[himerus]

Now I've found that I'm actually having a problem with posting when the script is running under a cron...

If I run it manually, the posts that are made in my forum are being sent properly...

If the script runs on a cron and tries to post, it is recieving a 240 status after the post is sent, but the message id isn't being inserted into the post field property... it only appears as something like <himerus.0@> and doesn't have the settings domain or message id included in it... in those cases, the messages aren't being sent properly to the server....

If I manually edit phpmyadmin, and remove the msgid, ref, and reset the isusenetpost to 0, and then manually run the gateway.php file, the post is uploaded properly....

Any ideas???

I will have to create an email message for each time the cron is ran to really test this I think... since I'm not seeing any of the output, but it is saying the post was sent properly...

[kkiely]

I just realized now that I will have to get a news feed if I get a Usenet hack. I read your review on your page of the 2 sites. One of the sites said 6 GB per month for free if i recall correctly but i'm not sure how much bandwidth is used for Usenet access. Could you tell me if there is any way to get a newsfeed for newsgroup access for free without having to worry about going over the limit and having your bulletin board lbank if you go over?
thanks,
KK

[Sanjiyan]

Any ideas when this hack will be upgraded to support vB3.0.0 ?

[sporty]

what Sanjiyan said!