This is the initial implementation for the new URL unfurling requirements. The
most important one is that only the message sender will pay the privacy cost for
unfurling and extracting metadata from websites. Once the message is sent, the
unfurled data will be stored at the protocol level and receivers will just
profit and happily decode the metadata to render it.
Further development of this URL unfurling capability will be mostly guided by
issues created on clients. For the moment in status-mobile:
https://github.com/status-im/status-mobile/labels/url-preview
- https://github.com/status-im/status-mobile/issues/15918
- https://github.com/status-im/status-mobile/issues/15917
- https://github.com/status-im/status-mobile/issues/15910
- https://github.com/status-im/status-mobile/issues/15909
- https://github.com/status-im/status-mobile/issues/15908
- https://github.com/status-im/status-mobile/issues/15906
- https://github.com/status-im/status-mobile/issues/15905
### Terminology
In the code, I've tried to stick to the word "unfurl URL" to really mean the
process of extracting metadata from a website, sort of lower level. I use "link
preview" to mean a higher level structure which is enriched by unfurled data.
"link preview" is also how designers refer to it.
### User flows
1. Carol needs to see link previews while typing in the chat input field. Notice
from the diagram nothing is persisted and that status-go endpoints are
essentially stateless.
```
#+begin_src plantuml :results verbatim
Client->>Server: Call wakuext_getTextURLs
Server-->>Client: Normalized URLs
Client->>Client: Render cached unfurled URLs
Client->>Server: Unfurl non-cached URLs.\nCall wakuext_unfurlURLs
Server->>Website: Fetch metadata
Website-->>Server: Metadata (thumbnail URL, title, etc)
Server->>Website: Fetch thumbnail
Server->>Website: Fetch favicon
Website-->>Server: Favicon bytes
Website-->>Server: Thumbnail bytes
Server->>Server: Decode & process images
Server-->>Client: Unfurled data (thumbnail data URI, etc)
#+end_src
```
```
,------. ,------. ,-------.
|Client| |Server| |Website|
`--+---' `--+---' `---+---'
| Call wakuext_getTextURLs | |
| ---------------------------------------> |
| | |
| Normalized URLs | |
| <- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
| | |
|----. | |
| | Render cached unfurled URLs | |
|<---' | |
| | |
| Unfurl non-cached URLs. | |
| Call wakuext_unfurlURLs | |
| ---------------------------------------> |
| | |
| | Fetch metadata |
| | ------------------------------------>
| | |
| | Metadata (thumbnail URL, title, etc)|
| | <- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
| | |
| | Fetch thumbnail |
| | ------------------------------------>
| | |
| | Fetch favicon |
| | ------------------------------------>
| | |
| | Favicon bytes |
| | <- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
| | |
| | Thumbnail bytes |
| | <- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
| | |
| |----. |
| | | Decode & process images |
| |<---' |
| | |
| Unfurled data (thumbnail data URI, etc)| |
| <- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
,--+---. ,--+---. ,---+---.
|Client| |Server| |Website|
`------' `------' `-------'
```
2. Carol sends the text message with link previews in the RPC request
wakuext_sendChatMessages. status-go assumes the link previews are good
because it can't and shouldn't attempt to re-unfurl them.
```
#+begin_src plantuml :results verbatim
Client->>Server: Call wakuext_sendChatMessages
Server->>Server: Transform link previews to\nbe proto-marshalled
Server->DB: Write link previews serialized as JSON
Server-->>Client: Updated message response
#+end_src
```
```
,------. ,------. ,--.
|Client| |Server| |DB|
`--+---' `--+---' `+-'
| Call wakuext_sendChatMessages| |
| -----------------------------> |
| | |
| |----. |
| | | Transform link previews to |
| |<---' be proto-marshalled |
| | |
| | |
| | Write link previews serialized as JSON|
| | -------------------------------------->
| | |
| Updated message response | |
| <- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
,--+---. ,--+---. ,+-.
|Client| |Server| |DB|
`------' `------' `--'
```
3. The message was sent over waku and persisted locally in Carol's device. She
should now see the link previews in the chat history. There can be many link
previews shared by other chat members, therefore it is important to serve the
assets via the media server to avoid overloading the ReactNative bridge with
lots of big JSON payloads containing base64 encoded data URIs (maybe this
concern is meaningless for desktop). When a client is rendering messages with
link previews, they will have the field linkPreviews, and the thumbnail URL
will point to the local media server.
```
#+begin_src plantuml :results verbatim
Client->>Server: GET /link-preview/thumbnail (media server)
Server->>DB: Read from user_messages.unfurled_links
Server->Server: Unmarshal JSON
Server-->>Client: HTTP Content-Type: image/jpeg/etc
#+end_src
```
```
,------. ,------. ,--.
|Client| |Server| |DB|
`--+---' `--+---' `+-'
| GET /link-preview/thumbnail (media server)| |
| ------------------------------------------> |
| | |
| | Read from user_messages.unfurled_links|
| | -------------------------------------->
| | |
| |----. |
| | | Unmarshal JSON |
| |<---' |
| | |
| HTTP Content-Type: image/jpeg/etc | |
| <- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
,--+---. ,--+---. ,+-.
|Client| |Server| |DB|
`------' `------' `--'
```
### Some limitations of the current implementation
The following points will become separate issues in status-go that I'll work on
over the next couple weeks. In no order of importance:
- Improve how multiple links are fetched; retries on failure and testing how
unfurling behaves around the timeout limits (deterministically, not by making
real HTTP calls as I did). https://github.com/status-im/status-go/issues/3498
- Unfurl favicons and store them in the protobuf too.
- For this PR, I added unfurling support only for websites with OpenGraph
https://ogp.me/ meta tags. Other unfurlers will be implemented on demand. The
next one will probably be for oEmbed https://oembed.com/, the protocol
supported by YouTube, for example.
- Resize and/or compress thumbnails (and favicons). Often times, thumbnails are
huge for the purposes of link previews. There is already support for
compressing JPEGs in status-go, but I prefer to work with compression in a
separate PR because I'd like to also solve the problem for PNGs (probably
convert them to JPEGs, plus compress them). This would be a safe choice for
thumbnails, favicons not so much because transparency is desirable.
- Editing messages is not yet supported.
- I haven't coded any artificial limit on the number of previews or on the size
of the thumbnail payload. This will be done in a separate issue. I have heard
the ideal solution may be to split messages into smaller chunks of ~125 KiB
because of libp2p, but that might be too complicated at this stage of the
product (?).
- Link preview deletion.
- For the moment, OpenGraph metadata is extracted by requesting data for the
English language (and fallback to whatever is available). In the future, we'll
want to unfurl by respecting the user's local device language. Some websites,
like GoDaddy, are already localized based on the device's IP, but many aren't.
- The website's description text should be limited by a certain number of
characters, especially because it's outside our control. Exactly how much has
not been decided yet, so it'll be done separately.
- URL normalization can be tricky, so I implemented only the basics to help with
caching. For example, the url https://status.im and HTTPS://status.im are
considered identical. Also, a URL is considered valid for unfurling if its TLD
exists according to publicsuffix.EffectiveTLDPlusOne. This was essential,
otherwise the default Go url.Parse approach would consider many invalid URLs
valid, and thus the server would waste resources trying to unfurl the
unfurleable.
### Other requirements
- If the message is edited, the link previews should reflect the edited text,
not the original one. This has been aligned with the design team as well.
- If the website's thumbnail or the favicon can't be fetched, just ignore them.
The only mandatory piece of metadata is the website's title and URL.
- Link previews in clients should be generated in near real-time, that is, as
the user types, previews are updated. In mobile this performs very well, and
it's what other clients like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook do.
### Decisions
- While the user typing in the input field, the client is constantly (debounced)
asking status-go to parse the text and extract normalized URLs and then the
client checks if they're already in its in-memory cache. If they are, no RPC
call is made. I chose this approach to achieve the best possible performance
in mobile and avoid the whole RPC overhead, since the chat experience is
already not smooth enough. The mobile client uses URLs as cache keys in a
hashmap, i.e. if the key is present, it means the preview is readily available
(naive, but good enough for now). This decision also gave me more flexibility
to find the best UX at this stage of the feature.
- Due to the requirement that users should be able to see independent loading
indicators for each link preview, when status-go can't unfurl a URL, it
doesn't return it in the response.
- As an initial implementation, I added the BLOB column unfurled_links to the
user_messages table. The preview data is then serialized as JSON before being
stored in this column. I felt that creating a separate table and the related
code for this initial PR would be inconvenient. Is that reasonable to you?
Once things stabilize I can create a proper table if we want to avoid this
kind of solution with serialized columns.
There were a couple of issues on how we handle pinned messages:
1) Clock of the message was only checked when saving, meaning that the
client would receive potentially updates that were not to be
processed.
2) We relied on the client to generate a notification for a pinned
message by sending a normal message through the wire. This PR changes
the behavior so that the notification is generated locally, either on
response to a network event or client event.
3) When deleting a message, we pull all the replies/pinned notifications
and send them over to the client so they know that those messages
needs updating.
Adds a new column named `deleted` to the table `activity_center_notifications`.
Related PR in Mobile https://github.com/status-im/status-mobile/pull/15106 for a lot more details of the feature.
Why? Relying on the `dismissed` column for soft deletion is no longer viable because the mobile & desktop clients should display dismissed notifications (sometimes), hence the need for a new column to truly represent soft deletion.
A migration was added out-of-order, which meant that in clients who
had already run the migration after, it would be skip.
This commit re-adds the migration so it's run, tested against an empty
account and one that had already migrated.
* feat: Add seen/unseen activity center state
* feat: ActivityCenterState for grouping ActivityCenter unread messages cnt and seen state
* feat: always use messenger's addActivityCenterNotification & add state to the response
* Remove unused activity center endpoints form api and fix test
* feat(ActivityCenter): Add community request AC notification
* feat(ActivityCenter): Add CommunityID to AC notification
* feat(ActivityCenter): Add membership status for community membership AC notifications
* feat(ActivityCenter): Add tests for community notifications and fix naming
* Add notification for kicked from community action
* feat(ActivityCenter): Fix for missing notification objects for tests
Main changes:
- Extend saved addresses DB with sync info: sync timestamp, update timestamp
and soft removed flag
- Create custom protobuf message payload to sync saved addresses
- Cleanup saved addresses on each start of messenger, by deleting
soft removed older entries
- Sync all saved addresses on Messenger.SyncDevices calls
- Sync particular changes to saved addresses
- Add SavedAddressManager instance to messenger
- Note, can't find a clean way to pass the SavedAddressManager to the
messenger, so we create another one
- Add tests for sync and new DB API
Closes: #7229
Restore the old, previously renamed, 1662447680_add_keypairs_table.up.sql
file while keeping the current one for those who already migrated to the
new one. The extra migration is noop and saves to keep consistency in
the user data states history.
`FirstMessageTimestamp` enables members of the community to determine if
there are any messages they can fetch on the community channel(chat).
`FirstMessageTimestamp` is advertised by admin for each community chat
through `CommunityDescription`. It assumes admin is online frequently
enough to capture the first channel message.
For existing communities admin determines first message timestamp by
finding oldest chat message in its local database.
task: status-im/status-desktop#6731
This introduces a new table to store discord message authors.
The main reason this table is being introduce is so that we don't have
to duplicate discord message author information in the `user_messages`
table when importing discord communities (ongoing work).
In addition to the table there are also two new APIs on the messenger
persistence layer (which are later used in the import logic):
- `HasDiscordMessageAuthor`
- `SaveDiscordMessageAuthor`
Closes#2759
As part of the new Discord <-> Status Community Import functionality,
we're adding an API that extracts all discord categories and channels
from a previously exported discord export file.
These APIs can be used in clients to show the user what categories and
channels will be imported later on.
There are two APIs:
1. `Messenger.ExtractDiscordCategoriesAndChannels(filesToimport
[]string) (*MessengerResponse, map[string]*discord.ImportError)`
This takes a list of exported discord export (JSON) files (typically one per
channel), reads them, and extracts the categories and channels into
dedicated data structures (`[]DiscordChannel` and `[]DiscordCategory`)
It also returns the oldest message timestamp found in all extracted
channels.
The API is synchronous and returns the extracted data as
a `*MessengerResponse`. This allows to make the API available
status-go's RPC interface.
The error case is a `map[string]*discord.ImportError` where each key
is a file path of a JSON file that we tried to extract data from, and
the value a `discord.ImportError` which holds an error message and an
error code, allowing for distinguishing between "critical" errors and
"non-critical" errors.
2. `Messenger.RequestExtractDiscordCategoriesAndChannels(filesToImport
[]string)`
This is the asynchronous counterpart to
`ExtractDiscordCategoriesAndChannels`. The reason this API has been
added is because discord servers can have a lot of message and
channel data, which causes `ExtractDiscordCategoriesAndChannels` to
block the thread for too long, making apps potentially feel like they
are stuck.
This API runs inside a go routine, eventually calls
`ExtractDiscordCategoriesAndChannels`, and then emits a newly
introduced `DiscordCategoriesAndChannelsExtractedSignal` that clients
can react to.
Failure of extraction has to be determined by the
`discord.ImportErrors` emitted by the signal.
**A note about exported discord history files**
We expect users to export their discord histories via the
[DiscordChatExporter](https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter/wiki/GUI%2C-CLI-and-Formats-explained#exportguild)
tool. The tool allows to export the data in different formats, such as
JSON, HTML and CSV.
We expect users to have their data exported as JSON.
Closes: https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop/issues/6690
This commit introduces a few changes regarding users accessing
communities:
While the APIs still exist, community invites should no longer be
used, instead communities should merely be "shared".
Sharing a community to users allows users to "join" the community,
which in reality makes them request access to that community.
This means, users have to request access to any community, even if
the community has permissions set to NO_MEMBERSHIP
Only difference between ON_REQUEST and NO_MEMBERSHIP is that
ON_REQUEST communities require manual approval of the owner/admin
to access a community. NO_MEMBERSHIP communities accept
automatically (as soon as owner/admin receives the request).
This also implies that users are no longer optimistically added to the
member list of communities, but only after they have been accepted.
This introduces a bit of a message ping-pong for users to know that
someone is now part of a community
fix: add verification request to response
fix: code review
add missing functions and simplify timestamp usage
fix: sync verification requests
feat: add endpoint to fetch all received verification requests
feat: add signal when trusting verification request
Co-authored-by: Jonathan Rainville <rainville.jonathan@gmail.com>
These APIs are being introduced to address #2706 and #2704, provided
that clients will move to using these APIs instead of the currently
provided equivalent APIs in the browser service.
The `bookmarks` table is being extended with a `deleted_at` field which
can later be used for garbage collection, as "removing" a bookmark is
merely soft deletion and doesn't actually remove the data from the
database.
In addition to those APIs adding and soft deleting bookmark entries,
they also automatically perform a sync operation to ensure that
bookmarks are synced in real-time (#2704).
Closes#2706, #2704
This commit introduces a new `clock` field in the
`communities_settings` table so that it can be leveraged for syncing
community settings across devices.
It alsoe exends existing `syncCommunity` APIs to generate
`SyncCommunitySettings` as well, avoiding sending additional sync messages
for community settings.
When editing communities however, we still sync community settings
explicitly are we aren't syncing the community itself in that case.
This allows to store community admin settings that are meant to be propagated
to community members (as opposed to the already existing
`CommunitySettings` which are considered local to every account).
The first setting introduced as part of this commit is one that enables
community admins to configure whether or not members of the community
are allowed to pin messages in community channels.
Prior to this commit, this was not restricted at all on the protocol
level and only enforced by clients via UI (e.g. members don't see an
option to pin messages, although they could).
This config setting now ensures that:
1. If turned off, members cannot send a pin message
2. If turned off, pin messages from members are not handled/processed
This is needed by https://github.com/status-im/status-desktop/issues/5662
This introduces the ability for status notes to handle community
history archive magnetlinks. To make this work, a few things are needed:
1. A new database table has been introduced to store message archive
hashes. This is necessary so status nodes can determine whether or
not they need to download a certain archive
2. The messenger's `handleRetrievedMessages()` has been exteded to take
magnetlink messages into account
3. New APIs were added to download torrent data given a magnetlink and
also to extract messages from downloaded archives, which are then
later fed to `handleRetrievedMessages`
Closes#2568
This introduces logic needed to:
- Create WakuMessageArchives and and indices from store waku messages
- History archive torrent data to disk and create .torrent file from
that
- Seed and unseed history archive torrents as necessary
- Starting/stopping the torrent client
- Enabling/disabling community history support for individual components
and starting/stopping the routine intervals accordingly
This does not yet handle magnet links (#2568)
Closes#2567
This is needed so that when they are bundled into archives, receiving
nodes can still verify the messages payload using its signature.
This commit introduces a new `waku_messages` table and APIs to store
such messages. Waku message payload is store for any message that has
a topic that matches any of the admin communities chats.
Closes#2566
Icaro Motta
frank
Andrea Maria Piana
Samuel Hawksby-Robinson
Ibrahem Khalil
Boris Melnik
Mikhail Rogachev
Stefan
Igor Sirotin
Parvesh Monu
Pascal Precht
Patryk Osmaczko
Roman Volosovskyi
siddarthkay
Vitaliy Vlasov
Richard Ramos