Tell Topics are a thing now

Tell Topics are a thing now

anqxyr 18 Apr 2016 15:09

Jarvis now supports tell topics, which are basically a way to send a tell to a group of people. This is how they work:

!tell @topic here is some text you want to send.

The "@" character is used to differentiate between a topic and a user with the same name.

If you want to receive tells sent to a topic, you the !subscribe command:

!sub @topic

This should be useful to let people send messages to specific staff teams, e.g. licensing or admins.

If you want to prevent random people from subscribing to a topic, you can !restrict it. From then on, only people inside SSSC will be able to subscribe to it. You also need to be in SSSC to restrict it in the first place.

There is no way to limit topic subscriber further than based on their access to SSSC. Restricted topics should not be confused for a secure private communication channel. They are more like delayed pings.

There is no way to see who is subscribed to a topic. This is intentional. For this reason, !notdelivered and !purgetells commands will not work with topics. All tells sent to a topic are final. You will be informed of the total number of subscribers each time you send a tell to it.

You can use the !topics command to see all the topics you're currently subscribed to.

Since !tell is the only command in which a topic can be mistaken with a user, it is also the only command for which the "@" character is mandatory. For all other commands, it can be dropped. "!sub @topic" is thus equivalent to "!sub topic".

I'm going to hold of announcing it in #19 for a couple of days to give staff time to restrict the topics they want to restrict. After that, it's free for all.

The full list of all topic-associated commands:

!tell @<topic> <message>
!subscribe <topic>
!unsubscribe <topic>
!restrict <topic>
!unrestrict <topic>
!topics

kaktus is the one who originally came up with the idea, so he deserves half the praise.

Re: Tell Topics are a thing now

ProcyonLotor 18 Apr 2016 18:17

Would it be possible to limit a team subscription to the relevant team room instead of SSSC?

Re: Tell Topics are a thing now

anqxyr 18 Apr 2016 19:04

tl;dr: I'd rather not.

There is a balance here between easy of use and security. The current arrangement is somewhere close to the end of the left side. The extreme end of the right side is setting passwords on topics via !restrict, and requiring users to keep track of them, pass them to others via some way, and then using them for subscribing. Oh, and they will also need to be used every time you want to get topic tells, because relying on nick matches is insecure. And in the end you're still not 100% safe because someone could've leaked the password.

I'd rather keep the system on the left side of the spectrum, and rely on users' self-policing subscriptions, and on people not using it for anything super confidential.

Also limiting subscriptions to different rooms would be kinda tricky without hardcoding it. The first way I can think of for doing it is to allow !restrict to be used in any channel, and then limit !subs to the channel in which the !restrict was used. But I think that's overdoing it too. I think this should be approached the same way as people joining SSSC - tell them not to, ask them to unsubscribe if necessary, make an op order if you have to, if they refuse an op order, proceed as usual for such cases.

That's on the side of people joining topic they shouldn't. On the side of needing people outside of SSSC to join a topic, you can !unrestrict it and then !restrict it back. I don't really expect for such a need to come up often.

Changing the system to provide more security would provide very little benefit and only in small handful of cases in my opinion.

Re: Tell Topics are a thing now

GreenWolf 18 Apr 2016 19:15

The use case I can see for that, and which I imagine Coony is also seeing, is licensing team, which is largely composed of JS not in SSSC.

Re: Tell Topics are a thing now

ProcyonLotor 18 Apr 2016 19:55

This exactly. There's a lot of stuff that Licensing needs to keep confidential, if only for a time, but still needs to get to people not in SSSC- restricting it to SSSC only or allowing access from 19 would either mean it's more or less useless or that we would be unable to use it reliably.

Re: Tell Topics are a thing now

anqxyr 18 Apr 2016 19:59

So what's the problem with letting everyone on the licensing subscribe, then restricting it? That's what ops did.

Re: Tell Topics are a thing now

anqxyr 20 Apr 2016 17:34

It occurs to me that it would be nice to list all the topics that staff made for the purpose of users contacting staff via them. Then we can put them in the chat guide or somewhere. So if you've made one, post them here please so we'd at least have them all in one place. I'll start:

@images - official topic for the image team. If you have questions about image licensing, both in general and in regard to particular image, or questions about staff policy on images, send them here.

Re: Tell Topics are a thing now

(account deleted) 21 Apr 2016 01:40

@19ops for, well, ops. In 19. #Site19, y'know, the chatroom.