Putting thread notifications onto instant messaging channels

adam42

While trying to improve communications in our little group, I've been posting links to our flarum threads into our instant messaging channels (Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp), because a lot of us are crap with email.

Flarum is great IMHO on my mobile browser for reading and writing, but it's a case of getting people to open it up.

My search didn't turn up anything that looked like an extension I can plug'n'play, but I figure there must be a way of doing it.

luceos

adam42 you can use the pwa extension to create an actual app, published for Android and iOS, or not published as an enriched website on your phone. But you can also check if the webhook extension by @datitisev is still active, it would allow pushing posts to different media.

adam42

THanks @luceos The PWA extension has the slight disadvantage of being marked incompatible and abandoned on extiverse, and perhaps a bigger disadvantage in that I can't tell really work out (despite 10 mins of reading) what a progressive web app is or how I could set that up to pipe traffic to instant messaging.

FoF Webhooks looks promising apart from having a webpage that wasn't updated in 5 years https://discuss.flarum.org/d/17812-friendsofflarum-webhooks which only mentions slack, teams and discord. When you say it allows pushing posts to different media, do you mean it has a generic ability to be configured for my purposes, or would it be something that needs programmer capabilities?

luceos

adam42 The PWA extension has the slight disadvantage of being marked incompatible and abandoned on extiverse, and perhaps a bigger disadvantage in that I can't tell really work out (despite 10 mins of reading) what a progressive web app is or how I could set that up to pipe traffic to instant messaging.

https://extiverse.com/extension/askvortsov/flarum-pwa, it's actually not abandoned. We've recently contributed to its development to make it work with PWA builder and as an app. The benefit with publishing it as an app is native notifications on mobile.

If you're looking for a more specific implementation for your media then having it built is probably the only option right now, unless extiverse has an extension specific for that media channel.

adam42

There's nothing on extiverse for whatsapp, which is the main communications channel I'm trying to break into with flarum. It seems people only look at whatsapp and email is an afterthought.

I saw there's a login & notifications extension for Telegram, but that's a no-go because we use SSO from nextcloud 🙁

The idea of PWA sounds nice, but again, the problem is breaking through to the people on whatsapp.

Having it build sounds seriously expensive. If something existed, we could afford the $10 per month, but we have no budget and rely on volunteers for everything.

treyb

adam42 I would also be interested in a different alert, via whatsapp or sms even. Would the webhooks plugin be updated at some point to extend?

The PWA push works great though on my iphone.

adam42

I tried web notifications but I couldn't get them to work unless firefox was open and had my flarum site loaded in a tab. And then I think the forum didn't queue the notifications, if you missed it, it was never seen. I also think the installation step just wouldn't happen with a lot of my group.

adam42

It seems to be possible to connect what Zapier calls webhooks with whatsapp:
https://zapier.com/apps/whatsapp-notifications/integrations/webhook
I'm investigating whether zapier can react to emails as well, and how much it would cost.

adam42

I've worked out it's relatively easy to get a notification from email via zapier in a Telegram chat group. I created an IMAP filter in the inbox of the mail address I set up for Flarum. That puts the notification into an IMAP folder which Zapier monitors, and with the freebie Zapier zap for Telegram, it puts the blurb of the notification including the thread title and the link into the Telegram chat. This is great for my Gen Z users who never look at their emails and wouldn't remember to check the forum.

There is a problem with my Gen X users though. Half of them ignore emails as well and will only react to WhatsApp notifications. But I can't post a message into a WhatsApp chat. The Zapier functionality just isn't there. Presumably all the FOSS programmers out there who create Telegram modules hate the idea of playing with Zuckerberg products.

The only Zapier Whatsapp zap lets me send a message to my personal whatsapp account saying "Forum sent a message at https://blah.com/thread-url" The next step is to get Whatsapp to automatically put the incoming whatsapp message into the chat. No hopeful though 🙁

luceos

We should really start aProposals (if it doesn't exist yet) for zapier or ifttt support, I think that would be a more performant an reliable solution, if an extension like that would be build.