Obviously preventing people from sending or visiting URLs is a poor choice, and obviously some people want previews. Security isn’t stopping people from doing things, or even stopping them from doing insecure things; it’s stopping them from doing insecure things by accident or needlessly. @9er is right that this would need careful integration with existing functionality like proxying. A bot sort of does this; @Leanderl, does adding a preview bot to your chat not work for you?
@Minim no, I haven’t found a way to add a chatbot to one on one conversations with my daughter (who uses SnapChat and Messenger to my horror). I guess Delta chat is not an app for “normal users” who want things to work out of the box and live outside Big tech’s clutches… There are additional considerations. It seems the target audience are people who’d prefer burner phones.
It’s just lack of developer’s time. Stay calm, and use fresh releases.
Create a group with her, and add the bot there.
I feel it’s hard to keep a nice tone of conversation when reading this. It feels like you think it didn’t occur to me, which, well, is not conducive to a good conversation. When you indirectly suggest the person you’re talking to is slightly less nimble in the use of their mental faculties It did occur to me and I dismissed it as an option for the non burner phone crowd.
- I can’t open the door to my car on the driver’s side.
— Climb in through the passenger door and slide over to the driver’s side. Problem solved,
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Leanderl, it is very hard to judge these things when talking to a complete stranger in text format. When I first spoke to @9er I very seriously underestimated their technical and English competence. No offense is intended.
Can you add a bot to any group? What happens when you add a bot contact?
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I noted
but it not clearly states why the group chat may be inacceptable.
Personally I don’t like the fact that in such group chat any bot will see cleartext content of all chat messages, and if it runs on someone else’s server, it may be unacceptable. Actually I prefer not to trust any server, even my own.
But I do not know your particular circumstances, what is acceptable for you in this case and what’s not.
But such group chat you can set up right now.
Client-side solution for previews will eventually be implemented, I’m sure, but AFAIK there are other priorities right now.
Does anyone know the address of the link preview bot that sends the previews as a webxdc app?
Source code at DavidSM100/webcopy-bot - Codeberg.org
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In my opinion, creating a group with one person or having direct contact are exactly the same thing, the only difference being that you can add other contacts to the conversation (such as a bot).
I would be against creating the preview directly from the client precisely because I like the idea that DC does not connect to the web.
However, I agree that adding a bot to a room means sharing all messages with it, and perhaps this problem could be solved simply by playing around with the DC interface.
In my opinion, when quotes will be added (I imagine that sooner or later it will be possible to talk to a person by specifying @contact), the same syntax could be used as in Telegram for “inline bots”.
In practice, it could work like this:
-
You are in a group and you quote a contact in this way
@contact_name message. -
If the contact is in the group, the person simply receives a notification that he have been named (so this happens on his client).
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If the contact is not in the group but someone that you have in your contact list, the message is also sent to that contact privately trough your client
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Let’s pretend that contact is a bot. If in its next message it reply with something like
output: reply, the output is automatically sended from your client into the group (bot > you > group).
This way it is possible to mimic the use of inline bots without the need for a central server and without the bot having to be inserted into the room, while at the same time having a similar experience like a client functionality more than bot intervention.
BTW for now it’s possible to establish one-to-one conversation with preview bot, send some URL to the bot, and forward bot’s responce (preview picture and copy of webpage) to another one-to-one conversation.