outlinebot

What this does

This is a telegram bot that attempts to create URL hacks that help people read news sites with user hostile designs.

Add the bot to a group chat and make it an admin so it can see all messages. Or talk to it in pm.

Regular users can use the bot as follows:

• Post messages as usual. The bot will silently detect and remember the most recent link it sees.
  When you know that the the most recent link needs to get the bot treatment you say /include.
  Immediately and from now on the bot will attempt to post a list of bypass links for all urls from that domain.
  You can also send /include as a reply to a message to target the domain in that message even if it isn't the most recent one anymore. Or you can add domains manually with /include domain.tld.
  Messages with multiple links are treated as though only the first link exists, even if the first link needs no action and a subsequent one does.
• /list will show all the domains the bot is set to act on.
• /remove domain.tld to remove one.
• Reply to a bot message with /delete and the bot will delete that message and your /delete message too (if it can) to keep things tidy.
  Only works on bot messages less than 48 hours old (telegram restriction) or less than 10 bot messages ago (bot restriction).

Additionally, users can request a google translate version of the most recent link by sending /translate.
/translate defaults to english but will also accept a list of ISO-639-1 language codes. For example /translate en fr es will produce 3 translate links.

As a bot admin you have some commands that only you can run:
/data - Show all the stored data for the chat where you sent the command from.
/data clear <key> - delete all the data in <key>.
If the bot throws an exception it will send it to you in a private message.
The bot will spit out log messages at the info level when messages come in or out. It does not attempt to permanently save these logs anywhere.
Data stored by the bot (like the list of domains to bypass) lives in data/bot.persist.

Maintenance

Ideally new versions of the bot will be backward compatible with the existing data/bot.persist file, so back that up.
But just in case, the list of domains to bypass can be exported per group with the /export command. This will create a simple text file with the domains listed in it. The filename will be {chat_id}_urls_backup.txt.
To import this list back into the bot you just upload a text file with the exact filename to match the chat you're in. You can even forward the message from /export back into the chat and not have to download the file.

Anyone can check the running version of the bot as well as the latest version available (if not the same) by sending /version.
You can also run /start to find the chat_id to use for this filename, and your user_id to use in the list of admins.

Setup

Clone this repo and cd into it.
git clone https://github.com/Yossi/outline-tg-bot.git
cd outline-tg-bot

Talk to the @botfather and get an api key. Open data/secrets.py.example and add the api key in the right place. Also add your tg user id to the list of admins. Save this edited file as data/secrets.py (without .example on the end).

• If you are going to use docker, skip ahead to that section.

Requires python3.10 or better.
Get python3.10.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa -y
sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3.10 python3.10-venv -y

Create a virtualenv.
python3.10 -m venv venv/
Activate it.
source venv/bin/activate
Update pip to avoid warning.
pip install --upgrade pip
Install requirements.
pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt

Run the bot.
python bot.py

You can instead run the bot with git ls-files | entr -r python bot.py and the bot will autoreload when any of the git tracked files change.

Docker

Build the docker image.
docker build --pull -t outlinebot .
Run it while passing in the full path to the data/ directory. (/home/you/outline-tg-bot/data/ perhaps?)
docker run -v /full/path/to/data/:/home/outlinebot/data/ --cap-drop=ALL outlinebot

List of bypasses

• Outline Dead as of March 2022
• Wayback Machine
• archive.is
• Ghost Archive
• Google Search Cache
• 12ft Ladder
• RemoveJS Dead as of summer 2024 (claims it will come back someday)
• txtify.it
• Twiiit For twitter. Chooses a random nitter instance for you.
• Twitter embed links. Loads way faster than the main site.