busybee fluffy rambles

There are so many papercuts with keeping isso running and I really ought to get around to writing something better. Working on software is the last thing I want to do right now though.

On the plus side, not a single person mentioned the broken comments to me, so I’m guessing nobody actually cares about them anymore. I only noticed things were broken when I was looking at one of my particular articles and was like, wait, where did all the comments go?!

I agree that this is a massive pain point and it’s something I’ve talked about a lot on this blog.

At present, I use a combination of 1 (via isso) and 4 (via webmention.io + webmention.js). The integration on 4 is also helped by using Bridgy and Bridgy Fed to receive webmentions from Mastodon and many of the silos, which strikes an okay balance for me, although it’s far from perfect.

One of the biggest problems with webmention, IMO, is that it doesn’t provide a good story for protected/private responses to protected/private entries. Ticket Auth might eventually provide that, but adoption of that protocol has been slow-going, to say the least, and there’s still open questions about how to actually manage the credentials in an unsupervised flow (especially when using a third-party webmention endpoint). An older WIP called AutoAuth had a much better story for that use case but the protocol was incredibly complicated and implementations never progressed beyond the proof-of-concept stage.

For me, isso as my primary comment system remains the least-bad option of a lot of bad options.

This article raises some good points, but there’s another reason I’m not all-in on Webmention: comments on private posts.

Post privacy is incredibly important to me, and supporting webmention on a privacy-post context requires that the comment (and notification thereof) be visible to the receiver’s endpoint, without it being visible to the world at large. This is okay with “unguessable” private URLs, but if you are doing a login-requred thing you start running into issues where you have to either let endpoints through to see the data (which means that any bad actor could also do the same), or you need the endpoints to support the authentication protocols (via e.g. AutoAuth or TicketAuth), and given how difficult those have been to get any meaningful adoption, I’m not terribly optimistic about that changing any time soon, especially with how many people farm their webmentions out to webmention.io which isn’t really in the business of managing things like authentication tokens.

But also, if you live in a world of webmentions for replies, that also greatly increases the chances that someone’s reply will be accidentally posted in public. I already see enough issues where friends will reply to my unauthenticated “stub” entries on Mastodon, rather than posting native comments onto my blog.

The more I get annoyed with Internet comment mechanisms, the more I think that email really is the way.

So, one of the things with the Isso migration is that I finally came up with a better way of handling thread IDs to keep them actually-private. And part of that is the mechanism to rehash them.

Which is good, because I keep on accidentally leaking the dang secret sauce. The first time was when I updated my sample templates with the comment hash generation (and I accidentally left the HMAC key intact), and the second time was when I started building a new Publ-based website and decided to start with my actual app.py as the basis, HMAC key and all, never mind that I later ended up removing about 90% of the beesbuzz.biz custom routes and the Authl config since they’re not actually needed for this site. Yeesh.

Anyway, whatever. Someday I’ll learn my lesson (and maybe I’ll even go so far as to make the HMAC key not even be checked into code!), but today is not that day.

As far as I know, all of the comments have been restored and mechanically updated to work correctly. It’s pretty neat that I actually have comments dating back to 2003, that have survived four separate comment systems! (Movable Type, phpBB, Disqus, and now Isso.) And some of the oldest ones hadn’t been visible for years, since I never got around to migrating them over to my comics section before.

I also now have a script to automatically rehash the thread IDs in case the HMAC key leaks, as it did yesterday when I accidentally forgot to redact it from the sample templates repository, oops. I doubt anyone saw that but now it doesn’t matter if they did.

I do want to make a final migration script to try adding thread nesting to comments which quote other comments. I have a good idea of how to do it but it’s gonna be tricky and since Isso apparently uses oldest-to-newest sort on comments I don’t know how useful it’ll be, anyway. But I like doing that sort of thing.

I also have automated backups of my comment database, as well as having it checked into a git repository so I can do simple checkpointing whenever I do something funky with a migration (and it means I can also run the migration on my local machine instead of having to worry about hecking something up in production). And of course since Isso runs as its own systemd unit I can easily take it down while I’m doing a thing. (If you ever notice my comments completely vanishing for a while, that’s probably what happened. Unfortunately there isn’t any easy way to show a reasonable message when that’s what’s going on.)

So, now I feel a lot more confident in the privacy and longevity of my comments. Which is good because I have a lot more private stuff to talk about. 😛

Because my original import from phpBB to Disqus got botched, and the Disqus to Isso import lost a bunch of useful information, I ended up just going back to my old phpBB database and reimporting it directly into Isso. It mostly went well but there’s a few things that I need to go back and fix. This is my TODO list:

• Unescape <a href> stuff that got converted to <a href> (example) DONE
• Defunge the weirder bits of BBCode where e.g. [quote] turned into [quote:abcde] so it didn’t get converted to HTML (example) DONE
• Clean up some older comments where I was a lot more accepting of Problematic Things (not gonna link to any but yeah they’re there) done, I think
• If possible, reparent comments based on [quote]s (way easier said than done, I’ll probably have to do that manually)
• Update: generate a new comment secret key and fix the thread IDs, because I made an oops DONE
• Looks like when I did the reimport of phpBB stuff I accidentally removed some of the earliest Disqus-based comments (example, also) so I’ll have to do a bunch of reconciliation for that, fun fun… DONE

Also some of my earliest journal comics had comments posted via Movable Type’s comment system rather than phpBB, so I’ll want to also migrate those over (which I never got around to doing back when I was still using Movable Type to run my website); back then I just had “native” MT comments rendered in the MT template, which was Good Enough and I figured I’d get around to fixing it later. Well, it’s later. And that’s done. Even though I’m up way later than I meant to be. Oops.

Oh, and since I set up monsterid for the default avatars I feel like I should try to track down the email addresses of the folks who were posting to Disqus and fill that stuff in wherever possible.

I promise at some point I’ll get back to blogging about stuff other than the website itself.