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).

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by Tim Wheatley
Doesn't that mean it requires a username and password? The server needs you logged in?

yep best thing is it that I have entered my userid and password which is the same for all the usegroups, and it was working on the ones I said it wasnt on.

yet for somereason now it decides to work on some but not others heh

overall now its working to some degree which is a lot better then the other newsgroup/usenet hack out there for me, as I cant run cron jobs.

so glad this is working and the support on this one is fast and good thanks to the creator of the hack.

[Tim Wheatley]

Damn, seems my server is blocked!

My server is in Denmark, I'm in England and all my ISP's block this...

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Tim Wheatley
Damn, seems my server is blocked!

My server is in Denmark, I'm in England and all my ISP's block this...

What is blocked?

[Tim Wheatley]

No it's not your hack. It gives a message saying (giving my servers IP details) that it doesn't have rights to access, I tried another and it stopped in the same way with no message, When I 've tried a free server it works, but craply and without the newsgroups I want :-(

[Tim Wheatley]

1 group(s) gatewayed.
502 Permission Denied - Access not permitted - newsmaster@ntli.net (Typhoon v1.2.3)
Logging in to news.ntlworld.com, group rec.autos.simulators:

I'm using my ISP user/pass even - but it's a no go

[Sanjiyan]

damn it..

I had the hack running fine till I entered my details into the nntp_settings table.

ie my websites details instead of the yoursite.com stuff...

any ideas how this would make the gateway.php just sit there saying opening website and then doing what it was dong before, ie the white page and stuck at 50% status

[Gilby]

I'm just going to switch it to where there is no default server. Just set it up for each one separately.

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by Gilby
I'm just going to switch it to where there is no default server. Just set it up for each one separately.

ok I think I have found out why I am having the problem

I turned all the groups to 0 ie dont download.

and then turned each one back on seperatly.

and its locking up on the only group to where I have made a reply to via the forums.

I have deleted the thread I replied to, and it still locks up on that one group.

Does this help you?

EDIT: so at the moment I have turned off the one group that I most need as it has the most traffic :P

EDIT 2: Sorry about my spelling it sucks I know.

[Sanjiyan]

Originally posted by Sanjiyan


ok I think I have found out why I am having the problem

I turned all the groups to 0 ie dont download.

and then turned each one back on seperatly.

and its locking up on the only group to where I have made a reply to via the forums.

I have deleted the thread I replied to, and it still locks up on that one group.

Does this help you?

EDIT: so at the moment I have turned off the one group that I most need as it has the most traffic :P

EDIT 2: Sorry about my spelling it sucks I know.

Another one, I just deleted all the posts that my local users placed on the group that is locking up the gateway.php, and re-enabled the group for download, and it is now downloading all the threads normally it seems, it seems it just has a problem dealing with any post one of my local users either replies to or makes new threads for on.

At the moment I have stop all users from replying to the usenet groups.

Any ideas?

[Gilby]

Everyone should run this SQL:

ALTER TABLE post ADD INDEX (isusenetpost);
ALTER TABLE post ADD INDEX (msgid);

This should speed up things considerably.