Newsgroup Manager

The Newsgroup Manager admin control panel allows the administrator to define newsgroup rules that allow FUDforum to archive messages from a newsgroup as well as allow the forum's own messages to be sent to the newsgroup.

FUDforum will store the Message-ID for messages imported from a newsgroup. Forum replies to these messages will go back to the same thread when pushed out to the newsgroup. Messages originating from the forum will not have a Message-ID when pushed out to the newsgroup. However, when they are re-encountered during import, the forum will capture and store their Message-ID's in the database.

Contents 1 Configure a new newsgroup 1.1 Newsgroup Server 1.2 Newsgroup Server Port 1.3 Newsgroup Server Timeout 1.4 Newsgroup 1.5 Authentication Method 1.6 Login 1.7 Password 1.8 Forum 1.9 Moderate Newsgroup Posts 1.10 Synchronize Forum Posts to Newsgroup 1.11 Moderate Forum Posts 1.12 Allow Newsgroup Attachments 1.13 Complex Reply Matching 1.14 Create New Users 1.15 Skip Non-Forum Users 1.16 Max Messages to Import 1.17 Forum Signature 2 Edit existing newsgroups 3 Import posts 4 Troubleshooting 5 Also see

Configure a new newsgroup

Enter the following fields to configure a new newsgroup and click on the "Add Newsgroup Rule" button when done:

Newsgroup Server

The IP address or host name of the NNTP server you are going to connect to.

Newsgroup Server Port

The port on which to connect to the newsgroup server. By default, all newsgroup servers use port 119.

Newsgroup Server Timeout

Number of seconds to wait for the NNTP server to respond. Increase this value is you get errors like this:

Unable to establish connection to ... on port 119 failed With Error #110 : Connection timed out

Newsgroup

The name of the newsgroup you intend to archive. ex. comp.lang.php

Authentication Method

Some NNTP servers require you to authenticate yourself before being able to send any commands to the server. If your server requires authentication, choose which method of authentication your NNTP server supports. Valid options:

• None (no authentication required)
• Original (the original AUTHINFO USER/PASS implementation)
• Simple (NNTP V2's AUTHINFO SIMPLE authentication method)

For more info, see http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4643.txt

Login

If your NNTP server requires authentication, use this field to enter the login name to use when connecting to the server.

Password

If your NNTP server requires authentication, use this field to enter the password to use when connecting to the server.

Forum

Choose a forum, which will be associated with this particular newsgroup, meaning that messages from the newsgroup will be imported into this forum.

IMPORTANT: You can only assign 1 newsgroup per forum. Therefore, the combo box to select the forum will ONLY show you the forums that are not yet associated with any other mailing lists or newsgroups.

Moderate Newsgroup Posts

This option specifies whether or not the moderator(s) will be required to approve messages imported from the newsgroup before they are made visible on the forum to the general public.

Synchronize Forum Posts to Newsgroup

Whether or not to forward messages that were posted on the forum to the newsgroup. If "yes" is selected, then when a user posts a message, the forum will send the messages to the newsgroup on behalf of the user.

IMPORTANT: If you select this option make sure that the newsgroup server you are connecting to allows you to post messages to newsgroups via that server.

Moderate Forum Posts

Whether or not moderator(s) of this forum will be required to approve posts made by forum members before those posts are synchronized to the newsgroup.

Allow Newsgroup Attachments

If enabled, ANY file attachment attached to a message in the newsgroup will be imported into the forum regardless of any limitations imposed on file attachments within the forum.

Complex Reply Matching

Certain mail clients do not send necessary headers needed to determine if a message is a reply to an existing message. If this option is enabled and normally available reply headers are not there, the forum will try to determine if the message is a reply by comparing the message's subject to subjects of existing messages in the forum.

Create New Users

When importing messages from a newsgroup, should a new user be created for every newsgroup author, who cannot be matched against an existing forum user. If this option is set to 'No', then all imported newsgroup messages who's authors cannot be matched against existing forum members will be attributed to the anonymous user.

Skip Non-Forum Users

When importing messages, should the messages posted from users who cannot be matched to existing forum members be ignored.

Max Messages to Import

Maximum number of messages to import per run. Leaving the value at 0 or empty means unlimited. When doing a 1st import which may need to import a lot of messages, since there is no starting point, it is important to set this option to prevent the import script from timing out.

Forum Signature

A string of text to append to the end of every message sent from the forum back to the newsgroup.

Edit existing newsgroups

At the bottom of the control panel there is a list of existing newsgroup rules. Each entry shows 4 pieces of information about the newsgroup:

• Newsgroup Rule, which is an identifier of the rule, the newsgroup name represents the value of this option.
• Forum the name of the forum associated with this newsgroup rule.
• Exec Line this field contains the execution line which needs to be executed in order to import messages from a newsgroup into the forum.
• Tracker shows the next article number that will be imported (position where to start with next load).

Options are presented to edit the rule, delete it or to clear the newsgroup's tracker (reset message pointer to the first message in the group).

Users that want to set the tracker value to a specific message can do so from the SQL Manager by executing a SQL statement like:

UPDATE fud30_nntp SET tracker = 123 WHERE newsgroup = 'my.newsgroup.name';

Import posts

Any system scheduler can be used to execute the 'Exec Line' (see above) to load posts into the forum. On LINUX/UNIX systems one would typically setup a cron job to run every 2-3 minutes. On Windows systems one can use the task scheduler to accomplish the same thing.

Nntp.php (in the forums scripts directory) requires you to have a PHP command line executable (cgi/cli) installed. If you have standard installation of PHP for Apache web server, then there are very high chances that you already have PHP CLI installed on your system. This executable can typically be found at /usr/bin/php, however on some distributions that may not be the case. If your PHP binary is not in /usr/bin/php, you will need to change the first line of the nntp.php script from

#!/usr/bin/php

to

#!/path/to/your/php/binary

The following is a sample crontab that will import messages from a newsgroup associated with rule #1 every 2 minutes.

*/2 * * * * /home/forum/forum/scripts/nntp.php 1

WARNING: When you import multiple newsgroups, ensure they don't all start at the same time!

Troubleshooting

Please monitor the Error Log Viewer for problems (FUDforum 3.0.2 and later releases). Users running older releases can view the errors/.nntp/error_log file for problems (this file was moved to errors/nntp_errors in 3.0.2).

Also note that invalid messages that could not be loaded will be copied to the forum's errors/.mlist/ directory.

If you use cron (or any other system scheduler for that matter), ensure you write the errors somewhere. For example, append this to the crontab line:

>>/tmp/mail.log 2>&1

Also see

• Mailing List Manager, control panel for loading Mailing List messages.
• XML Aggregation, control panel for loading XML feeds into a forum.