Special casing of the "!" symbol in mentions
!Friendica Developers
Hello!
I have written a tool [1] to emulate group accounts on Mastodon, because this feature is not available there. I've also extended it's functionality to Pleroma (minor tweaks) and would like to add friendica support next.
A short description of how it works:
The group account follows people. If these mention the group account with a prepended exclamation mark - like "!@groupmention" - The message will be automatically retootet/shared by the group account.
In friendica the "!" symbol has its own special meaning in addressing forums. Altough as far as I could find out, it addresses them like "!forummention" Theoretically a construct like "!@groupmention" should be possible or did I overlook something?
I tried and checked a lot. Most of the time "!@groupmention" just does not work at all. It is not recognized as a mention of another account. Altough when editing, copying and pasting around in the textarea I can unreliably get it to keep the mention intact. The post will then arrive as "visibility:unlisted" on Mastodon, which also does not work because only public posts will be shared.
Anyway, I am not completely aversed of special casing the trigger for friendica - "?@groupmention" seems to work just fine. Consistency over all supported platforms would be preferred though, so I'd like to hear from the friendica developers what they think.
There is another feature that works with direct messages and here the situation looks even more complicated. But first things first - that is a question for another thread.
[1] tootgroup.py GitHub page
Hello!
I have written a tool [1] to emulate group accounts on Mastodon, because this feature is not available there. I've also extended it's functionality to Pleroma (minor tweaks) and would like to add friendica support next.
A short description of how it works:
The group account follows people. If these mention the group account with a prepended exclamation mark - like "!@groupmention" - The message will be automatically retootet/shared by the group account.
In friendica the "!" symbol has its own special meaning in addressing forums. Altough as far as I could find out, it addresses them like "!forummention" Theoretically a construct like "!@groupmention" should be possible or did I overlook something?
I tried and checked a lot. Most of the time "!@groupmention" just does not work at all. It is not recognized as a mention of another account. Altough when editing, copying and pasting around in the textarea I can unreliably get it to keep the mention intact. The post will then arrive as "visibility:unlisted" on Mastodon, which also does not work because only public posts will be shared.
Anyway, I am not completely aversed of special casing the trigger for friendica - "?@groupmention" seems to work just fine. Consistency over all supported platforms would be preferred though, so I'd like to hear from the friendica developers what they think.
There is another feature that works with direct messages and here the situation looks even more complicated. But first things first - that is a question for another thread.
[1] tootgroup.py GitHub page
Friendica Developers reshared this.
Hypolite Petovan 5 months ago •
However what you describe with !@ sounds very similar to what we do with !, namely have the forum reshare a message posted by someone like you just addressed the @Friendica Developers forum.
AndiS 5 months ago
Apart from that, tootgroup.py is not really comparable. It is a script that runs independently from the Mastodon or Pleroma Server and just connects as a normal ActivityPub client.
It is mostly treated as plaintext. But the non-text before the @ is also not always required. ?@user@domain works but !@user@domain does not.
Can you give me a pointer to where this is handled in the friendica source? I'll try to get to the bottom of this. Thanks!
Hypolite Petovan 5 months ago •
getTagsand is defined in
src/Content/Text/BBcode.php:2233.Roland Häder likes this.
AndiS 5 months ago
It does not seem that the "!" Problem is in the BBcode.php getTags method. But I might have found another Bug there. At least that is what I think if I read the comments correctly. I have created a pull request - please check it out.
https://github.com/friendica/friendica/pull/10598
The integration build failed though, so I might be completely off. In that case, I'd like to hear more about why.
On another note. To be able to continue in any meaningful way, I have to create a friendica development setup. Are there any tips or howtos in the forums or anywhere else. I could not find anything that would help me setting up a local dev instance with dummy data or something like it. And I'd rather not use my live friendica server for development
Hypolite Petovan 5 months ago •
AndiS likes this.
AndiS 5 months ago
This is how it is... Just wanting to check out how I can make tootgroup.py work with friendica, and now I"m learning how to set-up remote debugging sessions. I'm not complaining! Just wondering how deep this rabbit hole goes
Are there any other forum members who want to share their development setups with me and other interested readers? I'd be very thankful!
Hypolite Petovan 5 months ago •
var_dump()for frontend code, and the Friendica log for backend code.AndiS likes this.