Remote View

2y ago

Can you code? We need your help to improve lemmy

About two days ago we found a bug with the registration system on lemmy. Because of this we have updated our registration process a few times, and cannot deny any applications as the person registering does not receive any message and cannot re-apply.

We currently have several hundred people that we are waiting to deny, and some unknown amount of people that we denied prior to finding this issue which we would really like to contact and give them a chance to register as they didn't write enough in their registration for us to really evaluate if they were a good fit for this instance.

If you're a developer please take a look at this github issue and please work your magic to help fix this problem.

As an aside, we also have a list we've been working on for enhancements that would make moderating and administering this instance a lot easier, and enhancements we think users would enjoy in terms of UI and UX. We'd love to share these as well as facilitate a discussion to surface more ideas (and we plan to in the future), but right now we need to focus on the most pressing issue to us running this website, whether people can create an account here and participate.

115 comments

As a workaround you can go into the database and query directly for users with rejected application and email provided. Then write a script to email them. Getting a fix developed, reviewed, merged and deployed will take a few days in the best case. And even longer now because we are busy with lots of things.
- Thank you. I've suggested this method to @Penguincoder@beehaw.org and we are looking into it.
- Appreciate you! Good idea. :)

To work on bugs and test do I just need the UI and backend? Does the backend code have a embedded DB for local development? I can code, btw. I can figure rust out, great with JavaScript and JVM languages.
- @Penguincoder@beehaw.org may be able to answer these questions.
- The rust backend, Postgres Db and UI are all available as docker images. The rust “lemmy” repo has a docker compose file (if you are familiar with the concept) allowing you to spin up the whole stack locally pretty easily if you already have docker installed.
  
  I didn’t know it was written in Rust. I looked at it years ago but never went anywhere with it. I bet I’d be much better at it having written Scala for the last six months, never really got into functional programming until now.

Likely need to define some basic rbac controls. They signed up, sure, but don’t receive a “user” role until after approval. Then in the home page, when signed in with no roles assigned, they get a banner saying they’re still pending approval and will not be able to post or comment.
The major concern will be retroactively applying user roles to the existing users.
- I'm a fan of this approach. That way, we can return a 200/201 on subsequent registrations for the case where an attacker would query if a user name already exists on an instance. If rejected, remove the account. If accepted, add the user role.

Bit of a tangent here, but if you’re ever looking for experience designers to help out here and there, or to just give something a second set of eyes, I might be able to lend a hand or connect y’all with some bright and chill people.
You probably don’t want me making any PRs, but I know my way around Figma and a user test plan.
- I'd love to see you redesign some parts of the Lemmy UI!
  In my option, a lot of designing work is still to be done so I'd love to see mockups you can make and your thoughts on design work!
  
  If we could end up with a theme that looks a lot more like https://kbin.social, I'd be so happy. My biggest gripe with Lemmy is all of the white space, and none of the current themes improve that at all. All of the theme options offered by kbin look amazing by comparison, and to my understanding Lemmy theming is done via CSS based on Bootstrap v4, so new theme creation should be straightforward enough.
  It's to the point where, when visiting Lemmy instances, I use a custom CSS extension to modify a few properties to make it a bit more palatable to me.
  If you guys ever need help creating custom themes to offer to users I'd be happy to contribute.
  
  Nice! I’m pretty new, so let me get a little bit more familiar with the platform, and I’ll craft up some stuff!
  
  How does this work with a federation model. Is it possible that there can be lots of different clients with different UX’es?

Hiya! Lemmy was actually one of the reasons I started learning Rust, but I do also know JavaScript, Python, a bit of Julia, C, C++, MASM, NASM, MIPS, a bit of TypeScript, and Java. I've worked on both frontend and backend although I think my expertise and comfort lies with backend primarily. I'm not sure if I'd be able to help with y'all's issue as I'm not familiar with the Lemmy codebase, but I'd be willing to try and help debug the issue and hopefully get it under control.

Thanks for posting and writing all this up. I'll take a good look at it if this is a Friday that work tickets decide to slow down.

I cannot code. 🫤
But it occurs to me that we need a couple of features - although maybe they already exist.
One is the ability to back up a Lemmy account and download the data.
The other is account portability - the ability to move an account from one instance to another.
But I suspect that #2 might be impossible.
- mastodon has some portability features but not the ability to fully move the content of your account: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ though you can move some stuff like friend lists etc.

I wonder if the RES devs might consider working on BES (or LES)?
- We can definitely use all the help we can get. Luckily since lemmy and its UI is open source, we can embed all this highly popular functionality directly into lemmy-ui.
  
  I'd love it. I don't hate the UI as it currently is, but I'd definitely appreciate some features, like the hotkeys RES has, or a tighter UI in general, with less padding and space between elements.
  To be fair, tweaking the UI is surely in my power and skillset, but UI is surely my least favorite part of development as a whole.
- If I remember correctly, RES has basically been limping along in maintenance mode for quite a while now and there's only one or two people left working on it - and only from time to time.

A "quick fix" might be to test for a user unapproved status on login and provide it as a status (e.g. 404:application_denied). Then the behaviour can be either release all created but unapproved accounts after 24hrs elapse or perma-"ban" until approved like it is now depending on server preferences.
"Quick fix" as in it's seems quick but will take me a while to implement if I were to try and I won't have time for a few days to get serious and become familiar with the code.
- 404 wouldn't be the right status code, 403 would be more suitable.
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status#client_error_responses
  
  Servers may also send [a 404] response instead of 403 Forbidden to hide the existence of a resource from an unauthorized client.
  In this case, I agree that 403 is the better response, but for some resources, in the name of security and privacy, 404 might be more appropriate depending on the request.

I thought this was a mistake. I filled out an application early on and didn’t fill it out correctly. I expect that account was denied, but I did notice that the user was created the exact second I applied which was weird. I assume the username is now in a limbo state. Seems strange that lemmy would create an account before it’s approved.
- There needs to be something to approve or reject, after all. It could have been a separate table but this way is probably better ultimately, modulo current bugs. The same machinery can be used for suspending accounts and other steps in the account lifecycle.

Off topic but I'm really happy that the developers chose Rust to code Lemmy in. Low maintenance + high performance is the ideal combo for open source server software.
- I'd second this. Knowing that the back-end is built on Rust was definitely big part of drove my excitement for this project!
  
  Yeah, I only found out recently but it's the cherry on top
- There are hardly any experienced Rust developers. It's going to be a big problem.
  
  I've heard the opposite from open source devs, that using Rust has increased the amount of contributions they get.
  
  It's a very popular language for people to learn (as per the Stack Overflow surveys) which is good for a volunteer project.
  Also, being somewhat inexperienced in Rust doesn't stop you from being useful, partially because the compiler will catch a lot of stupid mistakes. I don't think that "years using a language" is a very useful accurate proxy for skill with a language without the context of what else they've done, and your article is just looking at the raw averages.
  
  How much language-specific experience do you need? Rust is kind of it's own special thing, which is why the hype, but I don't know how hard exactly it is to break into.
  
  I might need to learn Rust. Java/Kotlin/C# are fine for work, but I'm interested in new stuff anyways.

I have front end and back end experience but work has me kind of bogged down this week. If nobody has stepped up by Sunday I should be free to start taking a look at it at the very least.

Is there a way we can minimize the stickies? It’s a quality of life but would be great to read it once and shrink it so I get to my feed quicker.

I have Rust experience and will consider helping out. I've been wanting to help out Lemmy recently anyway.

I forget my password to my GitHub account, so ill just reply here. I agree - it is a bit hard to know if youve been accepted or not. I just kept trying to log in once or twice over an hour or so, but I doubt thats feasible especially for the cases of people who get denied and dont know why.
I am not quite certain on the structure of a Lemmy server, but I imagine there's a log of users that you can join to a particular db entry for acceptance status and denial message. Given that you host the server that this is on, I imagine you might be able to append some changes to the login page to access these fields.
My thought is that there can be a small text input added to the bottom of the log in page that you can enter in a username, and have it present the necessary data pertaining to acceptance status. Again, not sure how this would work in Lemmy structure land, but in MVC where Im competent, I would have an endpoint that returns data as json, then ping it with an ajax post request. Id imagine something similar could be done here
- What about as part of the sign up process you offer browser notifications instead of after the fact? Decoupling is a good thing versus straight up polling.

I'm a beginner with Rust, but a full-time web engineer with React/TS/PHP/SQL/etc experience. I'm a bit swamped at the moment, but I'm down to contribute eventually :)

I’ll take a look at it and submit a post request with fixes within the next week
- Pull request*

@Gaywallet what if you signed up without an email? I don't think I added an email address until later attempts.
What can we do to reapply with a decent effort?
- We do not require an email at signup for many reasons. You do not have to provide one ever. We recommend having an email in case you get locked out of your account, but that's your choice. We are not currently denying applications, so if you are in queue to be denied (there are currently >1000 individuals in this space) you will have to wait for a fix.
  There is no reapplying until this is fixed.
  
  Does this issue also explain why I didn’t receive an email to say I was successful and only discovered I was approved by just trying to login just in case or is that a separate issue? Edit: I am a fool. I don’t believe I supplied an email address… I’m off to a great start!
  
  @Gaywallet it might not be the best alternative but deleting users who has been declined would at least give people another go at signign up before this is fixed?

I'd be happy to help contribute as best I can. I don't have much Rust experience but I'd like to learn more. One thing I'm noticing: I like that there are a good deal good first issue tags for the backend repo, but only one for the frontend. I'm not sure if there's really that far fewer intro tasks for the frontend or if they're just not tagged as thoroughly.

I can't code, but I'd be happy to send donations to those who can to work on Lemmy. I'm not a rich man but I'll happily help how I can.

I'm a react dev. I'm happy to contribute in my spare time, probably weekends and smaller issues. I noticed the client is built in inferno, which from a quick look appears to be fairly similar to react, so I'm sure I can be useful. I'll have a look tomorrow, can see a large list of issues so I'm sure I will find something to do.

as they didn’t write enough in their registration for us to really evaluate if they were a good fit for this instance.
I'm just curious, what do you consider to be "writing enough"? How strict are you with your applications? I'm trying to learn from beehaw for my own instance.
- We want them to fit in with our philosophy, so we're looking that they paid attention to our rule, our ethos, and our ambiance. To be clear, we're not making judgements, but if you leave it blank or only talk about federation, we can't be certain that you will vibe with how we moderate and what we're trying to do here.
  
  Cool. Roughly how many % of applications do you deny? I'm starting to wonder if I should be stricter with my applications for the sake of "user quality".
  I've found many applications simply fail to answer the questions. I guess this should at least be a minimum requirement.
  
  Hey, sorry to bother you again but I have a follow-up question. Maybe feel free to ping someone else that might be able to answer.
  How do you deal with users just signing up somewhere else and then interacting on beehaw anyway? I mean isn't that effectively just circumventing the application process?

I don't really know Rust at all but it might be a good opportunity to learn. I come from a C# and Python background so I might see if there's anything I can tackle.

It seems like a lot of developers have responded already but I'm a c# developer with some experience in Rust so I'll see if I can help with any issues that crop up on GitHub.

I got my approval email, is the problem limited to denial notification?
- The GitHub link details the scope of the issue

Ex AWS enterprise architect, for the commercial competitor to ActivityPUB, bunch of massive user base infrastructure if needed.

I would love to help. Senior software engineer with a lot to learn 😂

My dev days are a little while behind me, but I have experience in project management, QA, etc. Happy to help.

I probably should start learning TypeScript. Foundry VTT and VSCode also use TypeScript. I haven't had motivation professionally. I might need to take it up as a hobby.
I professionally develop in C, C++, C# and Python.
- If you code in C# then you'll find it dead easy. Microsoft essentially made it a web version of C# so that their developers could easily switch to web.
  
  Knowing TypeScript is similar to C# is uplifting. Thank you.

It’s possible, once they have a good ecosystem of apps plus a lower priced tier (maybe around at macbook air pricing?) However, I can’t imagining it ever shredding the feeling of dystopian-ness of it

115 comments