hikkabot

Telegram bot which allows relaying third-party feed updates to Telegram chats.

Installation and execution

Install using Go package manager:

$ go install hikkabot
$ hikkabot --config.schema=yaml > config.schema.yaml # this way you can get configuration JSON schema
$ hikkabot --config.file=config.yml # pass your configuration file

Alternatively, you can use our Docker image:

$ docker run ghcr.io/jfk9w/hikkabot --telegram.token=<your_telegram_bot_api_token>
$ hikkabot_telegram_token=<your_telegram_bot_api_token> docker run ghcr.io/jfk9w/hikkabot # you can also pass configuration options as environment variables

--help is also available.

Features

• Aggregator relays updates from various pluggable content feed providers ("vendors").
• Supports PostgreSQL and SQLite3 as aggregator backends (including in-memory with no strings attached).
• Automatically extracts direct media links from reddit submissions.
• Converts webm to mp4 in order to leverage Telegram built-in video player.
• Supports navigation/filtration via hashtags (use Telegram X on mobiles for best experience).
• Detects media duplicates and filters them out when applicable.

Vendors

Vendor is a content feed provider. It is responsible for parsing subscription options and loading, parsing and formatting feed updates and media attachments.

A user interacts with a vendor via subscription command. It looks like this: /sub SUB [CHAT_REF] [OPTIONS], where:

• SUB is the desired subscription. It can be in the form of URL or ID, whatever is required by the vendor.
• [CHAT_REF] is the reference to the chat you wish to add the subscription to. It should either be an alias, a channel username without the leading @, or . for the current chat. Defaults to .
• [OPTIONS] is a string of subscription options. These are vendor-specific.

2ch/catalog

Features

• Watches new threads on the specified board of 2ch.hk.
• Can filter threads based on a regular expression applied to the OP text.
• Can render a "subscribe" button in order to quickly subscribe a given chat to new threads via 2ch/thread vendor.

Options

A regular expression can be passed in order to filter new threads based on their contents.

auto option enables thread subscription button rendering. auto is followed by [CHAT_REF] [OPTIONS] which are passed directly to the subscription command when pressing the rendered button.

Examples

• /sub /b . will subscribe the current chat to all new thread updates in /b/.
• /sub /mobi channel_a (привет|пока) will subscribe @channel_a to all new threads in /mobi/ where a content substring matches (привет|пока) regular expression.
• /sub /pr channel_a привет auto channel_b !m will subscribe @channel_a to all new threads in /pr/ where a content substring matches привет regular expression with thread subscription button targeted at @channel_b with an !m option.

2ch/thread

Features

• Watch for post updates in any given thread on 2ch.hk.
• Relay both text and media updates with preserved formatting.
• Relay only images and videos from new posts with automatic media deduplication.
• Reply and thread navigation based on hashtags.
• Automatic webm to mp4 conversion.

Options

m option can be passed in order to relay only media updates.

#hashtag_text can be passed in order to insert #hashtag_text in every thread post instead of a hashtag inferred from thread title text. May be useful for thread grouping based on a common subject.

Examples

• /sub https://2ch.hk/b/res/123456.html . will subscribe the current chat to all post updates in https://2ch.hk/b/res/123456.html.
• /sub https://2ch.hk/b/res/123456.html channel_a m will subscribe @channel_a to all media updates in https://2ch.hk/b/res/123456.html.

subreddit

Features

• Watch for new posts updates in any given subreddit on reddit.
• Filter out unpopular posts.
• Relay both text and media updates with preserved formatting.
• Relay only images and videos from new posts with automatic media deduplication.
• Reply and thread navigation based on hashtags.
• Automatic image & video direct link extraction and embedding.

Options

!m option can be passed in order to relay both text and media updates. By default, only media updates are relayed.

A floating number between 0 and 1 can be passed in order to specify the ratio of best posts which will be relayed. By default 0.3, this means that only top 30% of all posts will make it into updates.

Examples

• /sub /r/meirl . will subscribe the current chat to media updates from /r/meirl.
• /sub /r/meirl channel_a !m 0.5 will relay to @channel_a top 50% of both text and media posts of all posts from /r/meirl.

Post samples

Subscription management

All notifications about subscription changes will be sent to supervisor_id. These will contain buttons to help you manage the subscription during its lifecycle. Note that some emoji-coding is used: fire emoji means "started" or "resumed", stop sign means "suspended", and wastebasket means "removed".

Available commands

In addition to button control there are also commands which you can enter manually. Apart from /sub mentioned earlier there are also:

/status

Returns OK for all users enriched with some debug information only for the supervisor.

/clear PATTERN [CHAT_REF]

Removes all subscriptions with errors like PATTERN.

PATTERN is the value which will be passed to SQL "like" query. So something like %404% will match Error code 404: page not found.

CHAT_REF is optional and is the same as in /sub command.

/list [CHAT_REF] [r]

Lists subscriptions with buttons for suspending/resuming.

CHAT_REF is optional and is the same as in /sub command.

r is the option you can pass in order to list only active subscriptions. By default /list will return only suspended subscriptions if there are any, otherwise it will return all active subscriptions (so all subscriptions basically).

Example (with pictures)

We start with a fresh channel. Below you can see that /list returns zero active subscriptions which means there are no subscriptions at all. Please ignore message time inconsistencies.

Let's subscribe our chat to meirl subreddit. 0.05 means that only top 5% of the posts should make it to our channel. In response we receive a notification which contains the button allowing to suspend the subscription:

Check that /list returns the new subscription now. Note that /list outputs a button for each subscription. Button action depends on the context: if subscriptions are suspended, the button will resume the chosen one and vice versa.

We press the button and receive the notification below. Note that suspend and resume notifications are always sent only to the supervisor.

The suspend notification contains buttons to resume and delete the suspended subscription. We could use the latter, but instead (just to show off) let's use the /clear command (note how we infer the pattern from the error message above):

That's it! Our channel is as good as new. Sorry for using the same pic.