I used other messengers like Telegram for years as kind of “storage” for interesting things, links and other stuff. Now that I found Delta.Chat to be a good long-term replacement for my daily messenger I want to migrate the stuff over.
Every migration comes with downsides like missing meta-information afterwards. To get around this I started to put the timestamp of the original message into the message I’m migrating to Delta.Chat.
But as unfortunately there’s no markup available in Delta.Chat until today this just bloats messages and reduces readability:
So another approach I was thinking of was to write a migration script which fakes the timestamps of the messages in a group chat. Something like a bot which parses the original content extracted from e.g. Telegram and sends these messages to my Delta.Chat group but with faked timestamps to reflect the original date the message was written at. Speaking of my screenshow above I want the yellow timestamp to be displayed where the pink timestamp is right now.
Is this possible somehow?
I’m also open to hacky solutions like “disable multi-device temporarily, import everything with faked timestamps in the SQLite DB on one device and re-sync this device with the others again”.
If you are talking about personal notes to yourself, it can work over SQL just as you mention.
It could be supported in a next version of groups by introducing fields through which bots could fake the date not unlike how they can impersonate member names already.
OK seems to me like the most simple approach to acchieve this as it is only for the migration.
I’m not talking about personal notes, I was talking about groups where only me and other accounts I use are a member of and where I share the notes.
I’m not sure if I got right what you want to say. Is there a “new kind of group” in the planning/making which supports this feature? Where can I find more information on this topic?
For others who might want to solve this “quick and easy” and don’t want to mess around with blob storage and manual management of images:
Migrate the messages over through the GUI (especially for images) and start every message with a “meta header” like I posted in the screenshot above
The “GUI way” is much simpler because a programmatic approach would mean you have to get all param values of the image manually and enter it into the message then:
Let your script automagically edit the table msgs for the respective account and parse the “meta header”, generate a unix timestamp from it, overwrite the unix timestamp in field timestamp and remove the meta header from the message fields afterwards (txt and txt_normalized)
You don’t need to touch the timestamp_sent and timestamp_rcvd fields so you are always able to determine the date when the message was created in Delta.Chat by right-clicking the message and opening “Info”:
Don’t forget to either do this kind of manipulation on every multi-device client or remove all the devices, do it on your “master device” and re-add the others after you have finished.
this just bloats messages and reduces readability:
