NNTP Gateway for Usenet ( Newsgroups ), Mailing Lists

The latest version: V2.3.2 (31 Oct 2004)

What is it?

This hack provides a gateway from vBulletin forums to the USENET. It allows forum members to read newsgroup messages as well as to send posts to the newsgroups. In a nutshell, it turns vBulletin forums into a basic function news reader.

For an added bonus, this package also supports mailing list archive and forum to mailing list gateway. The software retrieves messages from a pop3 account and import them into the forums threaded. It also allows a forums user to send messages to the mailing list by the forum posting interface.

Why?

The gateway will be appreciated by forum members who do not know how to set up a news reader, or people who do not have port 119 open in their network. A forum interface to read and post news are often considered to be better than a news reader.

The gateway adds more contents to your forums and allows the members to interact with wider audience. It is common to see new users signing up to use this feature.

History

This hack is basically a hacked vB2 NNTP gateway written by Gilby to work with vB3. The original hack can be found here:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...7&page=1&pp=15


Features

Some of the features and improvement include:

• Handles both newsgroup posts and mailing lists.
• Handles MIME encoded messages and attachment.
• Handles UUEncoded messages.
• Two Admin Control Panels for all settings.
• Automated installation.
• Correct thread implementation. All imported messages and posts sent to newsgroups will be threaded correctly according to References and Message-ID headers.
• Optional setting to thread by subject for mailing lists that strip references header.
• Supports TABLE_PREFIX.
• Imported messages will be searchable just like normal forum posts.
• Similar threads are built when the messages are imported if the system setting is on.
• Multiple attachments importing.
• Save attachment to database or file according to vB setting.
• Thumbnail created while importing image files.
• Multiple attachment post to newsgroup is also supported.
• Selectable X-No-Archive header honouring system.
• Light on system resources.
• Global Killfile to filter out unwanted messages. Killfiles can have OR and AND effectiveness.
• Strip footer by setting for incoming messages. Strips out repeated message footers.
• Built options to disable signatures and footers for out going messages.

Future development

• AdminCP interfaces. (completed)
• Installation/upgrade script. (completed, coded into AdminCP)
• Traditional "> " lead posting interface.

What do you need and do not need?

You do not need to edit vB php files if you use two bookmarks
You need to edit one vB php file to insert two lines of code if you want direct click links within AdminCP.
No need to run SQL.

Installation

Basically the AdminCP interfaces take care of installation as well as upgrade in the background. Back up your database first. The scripts can modify your database without alerting you!

Please follow the instructions in the readme.txt file for more details.

Support

Please post your support questions to this thread. Please check the FAQ in the third post within this thread first.

================== UPDATES ======================
Jul 31 2004 (release version 2.2.0)

• Provided option of not importing attachments
• Provided option of pause between messages
• Provided option of not sending messages to USENET
• Provided mechanism to skip importing a message if it was crashed on it
• Provided "Default Footer" option
• Provided strip_footer function for mailing lists
  (written originally by KevinM)
• Provided Killfile functions with Header/Body/AND/OR settings
• Provided ability to thread messages by subject for mailing lists
• Provided ability to use a single POP3 account for different mailing lists
  (use prefix)
• Merged KevinM's attachment routine, save thumbnail to hard drive
  as vB3.0.3
• Official support to have the script run by Scheduled Tasks
• Many bug fixes

Please note, when you manually run the script, you must turn on the debug mode. Otherwise nothing will be displayed on the screen.

To run as debug mode: http://forums.yourdomain.com/gateway.php?debug=1

25 Oct 2004

• Provided the option of sending posts using the real email address
• Provided the option of sending posts using a fixed email address for
  each group.
• Posts are now held back if they are in the moderating queue
• Scheduled task log is now working
• Provided the option of sending the debug messages to the vB3 cron log
• Bug fixes

31 Oct 2004

Fixed bugs running the gateway by the vB3 Scheduled Tasks

1 March 2004

Uploaded the new zip file. It contains one or two bug fixes.

[Highlander]

its me again
i just changed the emailsettings and now i get this when i set the ladt message id and try gatewy.php:

1 group(s) gatewayed.

Connecting to server, server says: 200 NNTP Service 6.0.3790.1146 Version: 6.0.3790.1146 Posting Allowed

Info for microsoft.public.access at msnews.microsoft.com:
211 16383 2 73657 microsoft.public.access

Posting Message 'Der Test' from Highlander. Result: 240 Article Posted OK

so it seems its posted.. and now what to do now to receive the newsest answers otr new articles.. that i did not understood really ..

EDIT:
ok, now 10 minutes after i posted my post and searched in the newsgroup with outlook i found it yeah it wortked .. but than to receive new articles i call gateway.php thats the point when he downloads and dont stop anymore downloading any stuff but not alwys, receiving its nothing .. just my test posts are showing up in the group ..

[Highlander]

..still not working correctly.. now tried for many hours .. wont work .. maybe my php 4.0.6 or MySQL ist to old to work 100% with this script.

as i said i can post in the group (sometimes) and many times it downloads without stopping the gateway.php. I tried to finish a download but then i reached 400Mb and stopped it now .. something is crashing . the gateway.php dont want to download messages but sometimes upload my messages i wrote or other wrote in the subforum for the newsgroup.

making a break here and getting a cup coffee .. it should not be that the script works for me .. it would be damn good

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by Highlander

..still not working correctly.. now tried for many hours .. wont work .. maybe my php 4.0.6 or MySQL ist to old to work 100% with this script.

as i said i can post in the group (sometimes) and many times it downloads without stopping the gateway.php. I tried to finish a download but then i reached 400Mb and stopped it now .. something is crashing . the gateway.php dont want to download messages but sometimes upload my messages i wrote or other wrote in the subforum for the newsgroup.

making a break here and getting a cup coffee .. it should not be that the script works for me .. it would be damn good

Highlander,

You could not post because you did not set "email" in the settings table as you have found out. What is your newsgroup settings for the MS Access group?

KevinM,

Got your PM, it seems your php set up does not have a temp directory for php to use. Do you have a directory under your control that php can write temp files to it?

xb,

Thanks, the empty attachments are the PGP signature. I will deal with this in the new version. (I should have time to work on the script tonight, and hopefuly tomorrow.) Which version of nntp_groups.php do you use that you had the TABLE_PREFIX problem? please check the cvs version at the top of the script. I went through the latest script, but could not find any missed "TABLE_PREFIX". The default user ID is 0 for guest. What did the error say when you used 0 instead of another userid?

[xb_]

Originally Posted by lierduh

Thanks, the empty attachments are the PGP signature. I will deal with this in the new version. (I should have time to work on the script tonight, and hopefuly tomorrow.) Which version of nntp_groups.php do you use that you had the TABLE_PREFIX problem? please check the cvs version at the top of the script. I went through the latest script, but could not find any missed "TABLE_PREFIX". The default user ID is 0 for guest. What did the error say when you used 0 instead of another userid?

This is my version of nntp_groups.php:
$Id: nntp_groups.php,v 1.3 2004/05/17 09:14:31 ns Exp $
[high]* xb_ hits himself on his head.
[/high]
just now i see that there is already a newer version. 1.6. Wow +0.3 version updates in 2 days...
Thanks for resolving this and sorry for the inconvinience.


I don't seem to get an error, and the posts are inserted. The problem i had with uid 0 is that the posts don't get displayed on the forumdisplay.php script. My guess would be that this is because of the permission settings on that specific forum (guests have no access at all there, while the valid account has).
If i opened up the showthread.php script with parameters, i could see them just fine, but this could also have been due to my administrator access).
I also think that the posts are correctly inserted, only they would appear when i edit the userid into a valid one in phpmyadmin. I thought its only in the threads table, but not entirelly sure of this atm; i made all the uid 0s' a valid one in gateway.php, while i was at it.

While we thought about this over a few posts, i'll try setting guests allowing to post new threads in that forum, and allowing to reply, while i'll upload the newer version of your scripts, for testing purpose. I'll check up on it when i wake up

[Highlander]

Originally Posted by lierduh

Highlander,

You could not post because you did not set "email" in the settings table as you have found out. What is your newsgroup settings for the MS Access group?

the settings are attached in my previous post before with a jpg image .. i set the email and i am now able (but not every time i run gateway.php) to post in the newsgroup .. when i check it out with outlook i found my test articles in it .. my settings for MS Newsserver are following:

SERVER: msnews.microsoft.com
LAST MESSAGE: 16534 (10 articles still left)
GROUP: microsoft.public.de.german.spiele
USER/PASS: none setted (there is no need)

you see i changed to ms games group0 .. its the same .. every free group i tried has the same problem ..

in the attachemnt i attached an image of my settings ... (email is set the picture is older so dont take care of this !)

question:
can you give me another newsserver for testing? your swiftel server want to have user and pass , cant use them for a test.

whats the issue with downloding all the 100mbs? why is gateway an lastmessage.php everytimne saving themself? is this neccessary?

Hope you can help me making the thing work

[lierduh]

Originally Posted by Highlander

SERVER: msnews.microsoft.com
LAST MESSAGE: 16534 (10 articles still left)
GROUP: microsoft.public.de.german.spiele
USER/PASS: none setted (there is no need)

Stick to the "microsoft.public.access" group on the "msnews.microsoft.com" server. Set the lastmsg to 73800. Disable all the other groups, only enable this group!

What is on your screen if you run it manually. If you use IE and it tries to download instead of displaying it on the screen. Please fix the Windows registry following the instruction here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...&Product=ie600

[xb_]

Originally Posted by xb_

While we thought about this over a few posts, i'll try setting guests allowing to post new threads in that forum, and allowing to reply, while i'll upload the newer version of your scripts, for testing purpose. I'll check up on it when i wake up

This went without result.


I checked the hacks i have inside forumdisplay.php, which is only a warning system. By removing this warning system, the problem was solved.

[KevinM]

Originally Posted by lierduh

Do you have a directory under your control that php can write temp files to it?

Lierduh,

It's my own leased server (although I'm stuffed when it comes to knowing how to configure it :ninja: ). I tried creating the directories and changing the path in the script but it had the same error. I then tried changing the v+ to w+ in the fopen statement and the script loops through the attachments without breaking, but produces the following error upon with each attachment:

Warning:  imagecreatefromjpeg: '/tmp/temp.bin' is not a valid JPEG file in /home/httpd/vhosts/ukgardenforum.co.uk/httpdocs/includes/functions_image.php on line 117

The attachment is downloaded and inserted correctly for viewing, except for the thumbnail.

[Intex]

Can someone confirm this works on 3.0.1. Thx.

[Odoin]

Yes works very well on 3.0.1