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.

[krohnathlonman]

I'm working on the mods to make this work with 3.5 and I've found where the post table has changed a bit so I'm working on getting things working right with that...

All DB queries have changed and the globalize has changed..... so it is a decent amount of work to get this working

[mcncyo]

Originally Posted by xnt

For Unix you can set up a cron job and use the 4.3.11 PHP CGI program to run gateway.php.
eg: this will run every 10 mins
1,11,21,31,41,51 * * * * /path-to-php4.3.11/php-4.3.11 -f /path-to-script/gateway.php

it didn't work it just output the html to the display

-bash-2.05b# /usr/local/php4-cgi/bin/php -f /home/website/www/forum/gateway.php4

<html dir="" lang="">
<head>
<title>My Christian Network's christian forum</title>


</head>
<body>


<br />
<br />
<br />

<table class="tborder" cellpadding="" cellspacing="" border="0" width="70%" align="center">
<tr>
<td class="tcat"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="panelsurround" align="center">
<div class="panel">
<div align="">


<!-- main error message -->


<blockquote><p>Unable to add cookies, header already sent.<br />
File: <br />
Line: 0<br /></p></blockquote>


<!-- / main error message -->


</div>
</div>
<!--
<div style="margin-topx">
<input type="submit" class="button" value="" accesskey="s" onclick="history.back(1); return false" />
</div>
-->
</td>
</tr>
</table>

<br />


<!-- forum jump -->
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="center">
<tr>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>
<!-- / forum jump -->


<br />



</body>
</html>

[krohnathlonman]

I got parts of the import functioning on 3.5... it appears to grab the text but attatchments and debugging output aren't working and I haven't had the time to do any further testing.

The main thing I need for my new project is the inline mod tools and attatchments... I've decided to stick with 3.0.7 and do the inline mod hack and stay there.

[Electronic Punk]

ah well

[yellowchaser]

Is there a way to have the username display as something other than "Guest" to something like "UseNet User" instead when posts are imported in from the newsgroups. Without changing the default guest account on VB. I know this sounds trivial but I have actually had people complain that it makes them look like they posted from the site rather than the usenet group.

[Kadence]

Tremendous mod

Only problem is the speed. I seem to be getting only about 3,500 posts/hour, whereas it takes under a minute to download that number through NNTP on a newsreader. But I suppose that's probably because of the vBulletin database functions taking up a lot of time, rather than the download of articles itself...?

Anyway, a very helpful mod, and much appreciated.

I see some people here having problems posting with Giganews; not being able to upload articles to Usenet (error code 440). If you have just signed up with them, this is because of the free trial period?during the free trial period, you can download articles, but you can't post; they say it's because of preventing spam. You have to manually bypass the trial period in order to be able to post right away.

[krohnathlonman]

kadence, the biggest issue you'll have with the speed is how fast your hard drives are. Inserting loads of data will take fast drives housing your MySQL servers. I suggest at least 10k SCSI drives with 15k obviously being faster.

[xnt]

Originally Posted by mcncyo

it didn't work it just output the html to the display

I believe you must be using PHP <= 4.3.10. In this case, just take out the -f option and use something like:

1,11,21,31,41,51 * * * * cd $HOME/forum; php gateway.php > $HOME/tmp/null

[Kadence]

After a lot more work than I expected :speechless:, I was able to modify this so that it works with 3.5 Beta 3.

What I did:

• Replace $DB_site with $db in gateway.php, nntp_groups.php, nntp_settings.php, and functions_nntp.php.
• In those same files, replace all instances of globalize( with $vbulletin->input->clean_array_gpc( ; and the tricky part: alter $_GET, $_POST, and $_REQUEST parameter inputs within clean_array_gpc to 'g', 'p', and 'r' respectively; and change the variable calls from $variablename to $vbulletin->GPC['variablename'].

Note that altering nntp_groups.php isn't entirely necessary, as the nttp_groups table can be directly modified via phpMyAdmin.

In nntp_settings.php the affected lines (in terms of the original line numbers) are around lines 92, 107, 141, 192, and 223. In nntp_groups.php the lines are around 324, 336, 368, 414, and 451.

Rather than replace all variable instances with $vbulletin->GPC['...'] calls, I just set new variables with the same names as the old ones, using $vBulletin->GPC['...']. e.g., add the line $ngid = $vBulletin->GPC['ngid'] right after the clean_array_gpc call; the variable $ngid can then be used the same as before.

One thing that gave me a bit of trouble was line 241 (in my modified file, line 263) of nntp_groups.php. In this line $group[?forum?] must be changed to ?forum?. Otherwise the form variable name comes up as ?0? on the post form, rather than ?forum?; and thus the table update doesn't work.

Note that I made a change to gateway.php line 71, and I'm not sure if it was complete; this would affect the 'log' and 'debug' variables, but those don't seem to be used anywhere that I could find.

The 4 files that were changed (nntp_groups.php, nntp_settings.php, gateway.php, and functions_nntp.php) are attached in .zip format. Note that I did not test thoroughly, so "Use at your own risk" warnings apply!

To add a menu item in the admin control panel, copy the file "cpnav_nntp_gateway.xml" to the /includes/xml directory.

[Kadence]

Ah, duh?$debug is used when passing ?debug=1 in from the URL Without it the logging() function doesn't work.

So I added the following lines after line 71 in gateway.php:

PHP Code:

$log = $vbulletin->GPC['log'];
$debug = $vbulletin->GPC['debug']; 


The .zip file in the post above has been updated.