Bitcoin Forum

How it works
My site scrapes https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent every 30 seconds, gets all top-level quotes from posts and sends webpush notifications to everyone who subscribed to those usernames.
It also scrapes the recent merit page and sends notification when a subscribed user receives merit.

Using
Simply visit the site, give it permission to send push notifications (it will ask right away), and submit up to 3 bitcointalk usernames that you want to track. You can click "test notification" to receive a test notification (duh), to check that your browser is ready to receive them. When you click on notification, it will open the thread and post that quoted your username.

Limitations
Since I scrape new posts, I can't notify you if someone adds the quote in their edit.

Webpush technology doesn't work well in privacy-oriented browsers - they don't persist service workers, or might just refuse to register them (chrome's incognito mode, for example).

To receive notifications in real time, the browser that was used to subscribe must be running. The site does not have to be open. If the browser wasn't running at the time a notification was sent, it will be delivered when the browser opens.

I'm matching /Quote from: (.*) on/ so any custom quotes will not be detected.

Firefox ignores "requireinteraction" option of service workers, so they disappear after a short period of time. This can be a problem if you are worried about missing notifications while you are AFK. See solution here (https://superuser.com/questions/1415120/firefox-setting-to-allow-web-notifications-to-stay-open-longer-or-indefinitely).

Supported browsers: https://caniuse.com/#search=push

---

/sub <name> - subscribe to a bitcointalk name
/unsub <name> - unsubscribe from a bitcointalk name
/names - get the list of your current subscriptions

Rules are the same as with the main app.

I am subscribed for myself and that's it and tested the notification as well.

Works fine for me while I am currently on google chrome.

Thanks, you are my first user :)

The site was deployed only a few hours ago, and I tested it with multiple names and got some notifications, but this project is still in beta, because before that I only ran it locally. This means some problems might arise, if anyone gets errors on the site or finds a post that they didn't receive a notification for, please report it in this thread or via pm.

I got the notification for my recent quoted post,so it working well for me.

But I got something and I am not really sure its a bug or not but I will report it here.

I did get the notifications after 2 minutes of the quoted posts but I did get when I clicked minimize on my youtube page.

Interesting idea for quote notification, and maybe I will test it myself.

My questions are:
- how can I disable notifications if I don't want receive then anymore?
- is any user data collected?

Thanks

Warning:
Those who are not aware, you may risk yourself to unfold your security by proving your bitcointalk information. No hurt feeling to OP but setting an IP log can disclose the IP of the user in the said site.

You do not know. I would rather keep myself away 🙂

Yes you can by disabling notifications on your browser which you were allowed earlier.

For chrome : Settings - site settings - notofication -https://bct-quote-notifier.herokuapp then click remove.

To disable notifications just click on "×" button next to a subscription. If you are still getting notifications (shouldn't happen), you can unregister service worker (google how to do it for your browser) and/or revoke notification permissions in your browser.

I only store the data necessary to send notifications - the list of names you are subscribed to and your service worker details. I don't use any cookies, and I think heroku also doesn't inject any cookies. I don't log IP addresses into any storage.


If you were in fulscreen mode on youtube, the notification shouldn't be visible I think.

Thanks for the assurance.

If the fact that their IP can be logged is preventing a lot of people from using such service, but they would really like to receive quick notifications, I might add another subscribing and notification option - Bitcointalk bot. You will just send a message to a bot account on this forum and it will be sending you notifications via PM. No IP revealed.

I am afraid many including me has the same hesitation. If you can do something like using a user account which use the same domain bitcointalk.org then you will find your work more successful I believe. I did try with some usernames (I prefer not to disclose) and seems pretty good job.

Honestly, i don't understand why this feature still isn't implemented natively in SMF.

All these mention bots are kind of useless when you don't know who has their mentions enabled, and who doesn't. (edit:This bot only does quotes, but i also saw a different bot that did @*s)

Although i guess quoting also mentions you, still, it's all pretty user-unfriendly... Would it be so hard for theymos to natively implement something like this in SMF like he did with the merit system?
I know it's supposedly in the new forum but looking at the timelines it's a pretty difficult guess grasping when / if that's ever coming out.

I think you are talking about Maggiordomo (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2340148) bot managed by the member Piggy.

Maggiordomo (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2340148) is the best solution for notifications on the forum because is the most advanced bot and notifies about all possible mentions.
Quotes, custom quotes, edits, mentions of username, username with @, profile link. Notifications are sent by PM or in the Telegram app.

I think OP can look into Maggiordomo (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2340148) bot because it should be very interesting for him to know how Piggy was able to get all of these mentions to work.

Of course, if somebody hasn't enabled it then is kinda useless, but this is so easy to set up that I think, every member who knows about, already have it working. I was missing many discussions because I didn't know that somebody mentioned me, quoted my posts or even only add my profile link in some scraped file. To be honest Maggiordomo (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2340148) notified me 2 times about winning in a promotion (150$ and 100$) which I was not aware of. Signed up and forgot about after some time, when I have won my signup post was quoted and bot let me know about this.

Notifier bot is really powerfull toll and should be added as a standard feature on the forum.

Wait, so that bot does work with native bitcointalk quotes? If true, then my whole project was useless, because then the only difference between us is that I use push notifications, which not everyone seem to like anyway.


I've read the OP of Piggy's bot thread, and my impression was that it is only limited to @mention, which is why I decided to make my own service.

Yes, it's true because I am getting notifications. Just quote me now and I will publish PM screen from the Maggiordomo (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2340148) bot.

Yup works with quotes. but your project not useless at all, cause it's easy and simply work with a single click of a button. if someone not enabling Maggiordomo bot cause they too lazy to do all the task require they will choose this one. but the downside is this notification only work for desktop and not a mobile phone, while Maggiordomo can pm you on telegram.
https://i.imgur.com/uMHjVcF.png?1

When you quote someone, you actually mention them in your post: "Quote from: hatshepsut93 on Today at 08:57:22" at the top of the quote. Thus, alerting the bot.

Might be true, I've just tried Maggiordomo, and with my current setup it's just too much clicking - I get an email from the forum, a push notification from email, a popup on the forum, and the message itself. In my site it's just on click and you are sent straight to the message.

As for mobile, my site actually works just fine, because mobile browsers support push notifications too. I've tested it on my Android and mobile Chrome browser.

I get a continuous flow of PMs like this:

It works on mobiles, what makes you think, it doesn't?

Edit : As op said, privacy oriented browsers and mobile Firefox don't work well, so problem is browser and not mobile device
 

Agreed. This needs to be implemented natively already.

Yes, I've noticed it today that my site doesn't work on mobile Firefox, not even test notifications are received, so I started investigating and found this: https://github.com/web-push-libs/web-push-php/issues/90

I've also tested other site that has push demo - https://serviceworke.rs/push-simple_demo.html and it didn't work with my Firefox mobile. From what I understand, it's some problem with the push endpoint, so I can't do anything about it.

Also, I've discovered strange behavior in Firefox desktop - overriding the default dom.webnotifications.requireinteraction.enabled makes service workers fail to render messages. Maybe it's a bug that should be reported to Mozilla, need to see if I can recreate it with other sites.


That looks like a bug, you should report it to Piggy.

Don't stress over it, there are plenty of browsers available, if Firefox doesn't work, user can use another.

Nah, it is a problem, sometimes people stick to one browser and just don't use the product if it doesn't work for them - I myself was using only one browser for years. Also, Firefox is the browser from which I use this forum, and it's annoying to me that notifications don't work as well as in chrome.

I don't have many browsers installed, so if anyone uses Brave or Safari or something else aside from Firefox and Chrome, I'd be grateful to hear if the site works with them or not. I know there are tools for that, but they don't check push notifications.

The new forum software will have this.

You can try if you want: https://www.cryptos-currencies.com/

Lol, it's what I subscribed to :) I was just showing an example of what Maggiordome sends me, the bot can't help it that I'm being mentioned or quoted a lot.

Nope not only on firefox, but my chrome, safari, and brave on IOS also don't work either.
Well, I've tried it mate. here the screenshot of all browser all of them is blank page except for safari, but still, on safari I can't test notification either.

https://imgur.com/a/bWika2H I post to many images lately, so I just gave you all the link to an album for those 4 screenshots of browser I tested

Do you have notifications enabled system wide and also for the browser you are using?

Just googling about that and found this
So that's why all my browser except safari only shown a blank page, even though the article I read it will work on safari, but I've tried many times for test notification and it still not working.

Did op's website prompt you with 'allow push notifications' and did you allow it?

If the site is blank, it means the site initialization (it's built with React) has failed due to an uncaught error with service worker. I need to catch that error and display an appropriate message to users, will do it in next update.


Thanks for finding that, you saved me some time.

I mean for safari browser, he said site works fine with Safari browser.

Can you subscribe to any names with safari browser? If yes, please tell me at least one name to which you subscribed, so I can try to debug it on my backend. Also in the next release I will render a message after you click on test notification whether it was sent from my backend or not, I already return it from request, but you can't check it on mobile easily.

Also, you can test push notifications here: https://serviceworke.rs/push-simple_demo.html - if it doesn't work, then the problem is with the browser.


Right, I missed that.

nope, cant subscribe. I tried with my name and my alt but this error msg shows up.
https://i.imgur.com/dXR2VH4.jpg
I've tried with the link you provide also not work.

Thanks, it's a problem with the browser. Seems like Safari, both desktop and mobile don't support it - see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API#Browser_compatibility

Considering how iOS doesn't allow it even in browser that do support the feature, seems like the whole iOS platform is unsupported :(

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent is broken and only shows errors, so my server has nothing to scrape and notifications are unavailable. Is this something that happens often or not?

Also, I've made some updates and you should get a bit better information about errors when they occur, please report them here if you'll encounter some.

It's the first time I've seen this happen. I haven't seen an official cause, so I don't know if this will happen more.
It lasted just over 8 hours.

Some say (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5179751.0) it was my fault :(

I didn't receive notification even though i was quoted (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5164058.msg52411549#msg52411549) today!?

Your push notification subscription has for some reason expired. Usually it happens when service worker unregisters - did you do something like deleting all cookies of your browser or manually unregister it? Maybe you installed some addon that can do this recently? It was also removed from my database, since it's stale, can you please go to the site and subscribe to your name again? Or if you are already subscribed to some other names, tell me to which. Also, what browser do you use?

No.


Sure, done.



No.


Samsung Internet beta. But, might switch to vivaldi in next few days (if that matters).

Thanks for your report, that was helpful.

I'll implement automated resubscriptions, but I don't know if it will fix such problems in the future, because it can be browser's/system's fault - if they decide to wipe cache for some reason, there's nothing I can do. Did you ever had problems like that on that device - you are suddenly logged out of some accounts, your settings on sites are gone, etc.?

If you'll encounter same problem again, go to the site and see if there's any subscriptions displayed - if not, it means your subscription has expired and you have to subscribe again, otherwise it might be a problem on my side.

Got it, i had cleared browser cache few days ago, that could be the reason.

Edit: cache on android is usually safe to delete so I don't give second thought.

Update: I cleared browser cache again and subscription is intact, so last time clearing cache was not the cause of the problem.

Feels like it automatically removes subscriptions, I have done nothing to the browser and still my subscription is removed ( (checked minute ago).

Tried subscribing again, says — Error: Registration failed - permission denied.

I saw that your subscription expired a few days ago, and it even happened to myself (but without dropping permissions) on my Firefox browser, while on Chrome everything is smooth. I'm still working on a fix, as it turned out to be a bit harder than I thought, because it's hard to reproduce this problem and test a solution.

Possible to show recent quotes as list (or something similar) rather than notifications, this would avoid browser problems and user will be able check at his own convenience.

It can be done, but it's not really a solution, since the whole point of notification is that they tell you when something happens, freeing you from the need to manually check things. I've created this service because I myself wanted to know when someone quotes my posts, as previously I was checking it by searching for my name on forum.

Overall it all works well in Chrome, but Firefox and mobile browser seem to be very inconsistent. This is due push technology still being experimental in browsers.

I get that, what I mean is, you enter the username >> site will fetch recent quotes to particular user and show it as a list (and not as notifications, or have both) — this will still remove the manual labor.

It's suggestion of course, you have to manage your time as well, so do as you please.

I can add this to Viewing unedited posts and deleted posts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5167469.0) if there are more people who want to see it. It'll be one big and forever growing page that shows all posts that mention or quote your username. The easiest implementation would include deeper quotes too (that makes searching the post for a certain phrase very easy).
If I do this, all you need to do is manually check that page, or set up something like Check4Change (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/check4change/) to do it for you.

I find this hard to understand.

@op do you have any updates planned or have you abandoned this?

Also, why am I getting this error these days: "Error: Registration failed - permission denied"

This wasn't the case before.

I'm currently testing a fix for this unsubscription problem, but as for "permission denied', I don't even know, cause I never encountered this error on any of my browsers. That error means that you should manually give permission to show notifications to this site in your browser. Like I said previously, push technology is still experimental, so it's expected that it won't work perfectly in all browsers.

I also plann to add a new feature after I will fix this problem, so I'm definitely not abandoning this project, I just don't have much free time currently.

I have deployed a patch that should fix the problem with expired subscriptions, all current users might want to visit the site so that a new version of service worker can get installed. Hopefully it will solve this problem.

Also, thanks to LoyceV's suggestion in another thread, I came up with idea of implementing merit notifications - you will get a similar message whenever someone merits your post, with a link to the merited post on click. Stay tuned.

Thanks, I deleted and re-enabled site notifications, it works fine now.

Wondering if this includes notifications for replies to your threads?

Regarding merited post notifications, I personally don't care much as you will see it on your profile anyway.

It does not seem to work with nested quotes (for example, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5192560.msg52765744#msg52765744).

Please correct if wrong.

Yeah, this is intentionally, because why would anyone want to be notified when someone quotes a quote of your post? It's a reply to some other user, so it doesn't concern you directly. If I allowed it, you'd be bombarded with these nested quotes, as many people here just hit "reply" without bothering to clean up the quotes a bit.

If you have time, could you work on notification for replies to user topics?

There's a forum function for that, so I doubt that many users will be interested in it. Besides, this service has very little users, so I don't think I'm going to be adding new features anytime soon.

You mean email notifications?


Fair enough. I appreciate you for making it thus far, it's helpful.

I have deployed a new update just now which comes with new major feature - merit notifications! If you are subscribed to quote notifications, you will also start receiving notifications when you are merited. The notification tells you how much merit you have received, from whom and in which thread, and as usual, when you click on notification it will open the thread. If you are already using this service, you should probably visit the site to receive the latest update.

Also, I have made an improvement that should help with the expiration problem on some browsers.

Next feature - subscribing and receiving notifications via Telegram!

giammangiato's telegram bot (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5209107.0) already does that, is there really need for that?

Is merit notifications working fine! Cause I am not receiving it for like past two days.

I just tested merit notification and it works, I also received some yesterday and I checked my logs and see that notifications about your merit were successfully sent. The next time you will send merit to someone, could you please for a moment subscribe to that name and see if you'll receive a notification? Could be some problem with frontend, or with the browser.

Not sure, I am getting notifications for quotes just fine, so (guess browser is ok), just not about merits. Anyway, not big deal, just thought it'd better idea to let you know.

If you use telegram as a messaging program to keep in touch with friends, you can consider using my telegram bot for:
* notify merits received
* notify on quote or mention

take a look here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5209107.0

As promised earlier, I developed a telegram bot with the same functionality as the main app - quote and merit notifications with the same rules and limitations.

You can access the bot here - http://t.me/bct_quote_notifier_bot

Use /sub <username> to subscribe to a bitcointalk username, and /unsub <name> to unsubscribe. Use /names to check your current subscriptions.

Hi sorry if posted in wrong thread but it seems this heroku has stopped working for some time now.

I don't use Telegram anymore, due to my own stupid mistake of polluting my private number with crypto TG in the ICO years, so I only used browser notifications that I can check at the end of work day.

Is there an alternative?

Concerning the crypto TG you could just mute them and put them in your archive at least that will prevent any notification from them. Or you could also change your privacy settings so as to prevent people who are not in your contact from adding you to TG groups and channels, that will also be of little help.


The one that I use to receive notifications whenever I'm been mentioned, receive merits, when my post has been deleted etc. Is still a telegram bot.
You can check it out here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5248878.0 it's still operational.
I don't know if there are other means to get notified but if there's any I would also be interested in it.

Hi, here's what happened. I lost the email from my Heroku account a long time ago, and recently Heroku was forcing people to change their passwords, so my Heroku account is lost forever and the app was shutdown. I thought barely anyone used my app (I didn't check the database in a long time, and it was always low), so I didn't bother solving this problem and myself switched to telegram notifications.

But if there's demand for my browser-based notifications, I could try to relaunch the app. And if someone is interested in running it instead of me, I could provide the source code.

Thank you for taking the time to explain :) I am sorry to hear it, I would want to run it, but I don't know anything about coding.

I would love to support something like this actually because I use almost 100% my browser (all settings saved to Google) and Windows notifications for everything to stay separate from my phone as much as possible. I used your app ever since I found it, it's perfect way for me to keep track of forum response.

I am willing to help pay for costs of this app, to keep it around for anyone who wants to use it. It's wonderful :) If the cost is not much I will pay it all :) What do you say?


Thank you. My personal situation is something complicated, to the point I do not use any sort of messaging for my private number except SMS and another app which thankfully for now no crypto groups use. It really got to a terrible point, it was not enough to ban and mute! And I do need my number to be free to call which was the point of Telegram. Browser notification in my tray is very important way for me to manage work :)