Newsgroup Manager

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

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.

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 you server requires authentication, choose which method of authentication your NNTP server supports.

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, therefor the forum select 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 selected 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.

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

Slow Reply Match

Certain mail clients do not sent 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 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.

At the bottom of the control panel there is a list of existing newsgroup rules. Each entry shows 3 pieces of information about the newsgroup. 'Newsgroup Rule', which 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 to which needs to be executed in order to imported messages from a newsgroup into the forum.

On UNIX based systems it is best to execute the 'Exec Line' using a cron job, that would run every 2-3 minutes. On Windows 2000 and XP you can use task scheduler to accomplish the same thing.

Important

nntp.php is a PHP script, that requires you to have a PHP binary (cgi/cli). By default PHP binary can be found on /usr/local/bin/php, however on some distributions that may not be the case. If your PHP binary is not in /usr/local/bin/php, you will need to change the first line of the nntp.php script from

#!/usr/local/bin/php
to
#!/path/to/php/binary

Example 1.3. Sample Crontab for Newsgroups

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