Technical notes

Hier the design of the application and open issues are documented.

For contributes see here.

Design of application

The bot listens to all messages, then does the following (see src/parts/listeners.js for more):

ignores posts by bots, regardless of content
ignores too old messages, regardless of content
if message has the syntactic form @<botname> /?command [args...], then:
- if command in config, then performs corresponding action;
- else does nothing.
if message has the syntactic form /command @<botname>, then:
- if command in config, then performs corresponding action;
- else does nothing.
otherwise, does nothing.

The bot currently supports 5 languages and decides which language to use based on the following priorities (highest to lowest):

Language hard coded into the assets/config.yaml file for the command under lang:, if set.
Language given as an argument by the admin when using @<botname> cmd [args…], if provided.
Language of the message to which the admin replied to, if the call occurred this way.
~~Language of the admin who called the command.~~
The default language set in assets/config.yaml under default-language: (currently uk --- Ukrainian).

It is unclear, whether the stopping proceedure for the bot is correct.
Functionality of the bot is okay, but we should consider switching to golang, for which there is a well developed Telegram-API and which compiles, which in turn allows for cleaner development.
Alternatively, there is are well structured python APIs (python-telegram-bot + telethon), and in python one can at the very least artificially encode typing hints in all methods, allowing for cleaner development.
Integration tests needed (currently developers are experimenting with possibilities here), in order to automatically test behaviour to increase the QA of each release and avoid »ärgerliche« bugs.