Aunt Hedwig

Aunt Hedwig (BlaB! AX/WS Pro) delivers in chat online content from external sources such as tweets, Facebook posts, RSS, images, news, stock exchange data. Aunt Hedwig cannot be triggered by itself - an external service is required which could be your own program, a Telegram Bot or any of the multitude of Internet glue services: IFTTT, Zapier, Microsoft Flow, Huginn, Intergomat, Tasker, n8n.io.

Optionally, setup a new user to appear in the online list in chat: AuntHedwig (choose any name). A new user can be created from AdminCP » Users. This user has a status guest so if you plan to delete guests with CRONJOBS or manually, it is a good idea to set a password/email. Also, you can set avatar/motto - there is a preloaded avatar in the folder /img: img/hedwig.svg. Remember userID and groupID of your new user:

• AdminCP » Users » Aunt Hedwig: put the user online as a fake user. On the profile page look at the URL bar of your browser admin.php?q=user&id=256 - in this case 256 is userID
• AdminCP » Machines » Aunt Hedwig: set proper userID, group and username.
• Add Aunt Hedwig userID to the stealtn_array in config.php to avoid duplicating in the online box
  

• The webhook URL that triggers Aunt Hedwig can be copied from AdminCP » Machines » Aunt Hedwig and looks like this: https://yoursite.com/chat/hedwig.php?key=XXX&text=YYY where XXX is a security key and YYY the actual message. Only key and text are required. Optionally the following GET/POST variables are recognized:

  • userid UserID of the sender
  • username Name of the sender
  • usergroup GroupID of the sender
  • to UserID to send a PM to, default 0
  • timeout How long to stay online, 2s + (1-30)s

https://yoursite.com/chat/hedwig.php?key=XXX&text=YYY&userid=2034&username=SomeoneElse&usergroup=2&timeout=20

• Messages delivered by Aunt Hedwig inherit the default message style from AdminCP » Style » Message Style. Emoticons, links and BB codes are supported inline: :hallo: :laughing: [b]bold[/b] [i]italic[/i] [br]. Stickers are supported as whole phrases (not inline): stickers/Stickers/en_cool.svg.

• Aunt Hedwig detects links to Youtube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, MixCloud videos and turns the whole message into attachment so that the video can be played in chat.

How to post in chat Tweets by a specific person with IFTTT

IFTTT does not urlencode by default. Any content that could break the web request must be escaped and this includes IFTTT ingredients. IFTTT escapes any string enclosed with: <<<escaped string>>>. Unsucessful actions resulting in error 400 == an unescaped part in your request.

Smoothing Hedwig

Internet glue services are far from perfect - they fetch and transfer new content at intervals - 5min, 15min or hours if overloaded. Generally speaking - paid ones are better, IFTTT has an enormous amount of triggers and the most complicated is Intergomat. Sometimes Aunt Hedwig might receive 20 or 30 new entries at once which would flood the chat. If you experience such problems we provide an additional tool that puts these multiple external messages in a separate DB table instead of posting them in chat directly and after that sends the messages one by one at intervals via CRONJOBS. Download, README is included.