Live testing of remote categories

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@[email protected] that's wonderful to hear! Thank you so much.

[altcode@community.nodebb.org]

Some of the remote categories appear to be broken now.

These are the Flipboard magazines NodeBB is currently aware of when searching "flipboard" in the search page:

• [Tech News by @[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected])
• [Musik News by @[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected])
• [Gear by @[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/category/[email protected])

However, that very first one (tech news by The Verge) does not work; going to it gives a 404 page instead.

---

Something else appears to have happened to the Vivaldi Blog remote category (a WordPress blog). A week ago it was working fine, but now, searching for it lists it twice in the search page. Each listing indicates a completely different number of posts and topics for the remote category.

Even weirder though most of the topics that are correctly slotted into it, they are not actually in the category page, e.g. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/a85b0eff-5219-46ba-9ad4-a5d417a7bec5/minor-update-2-for-vivaldi-desktop-browser-7.3

[altcode@community.nodebb.org]

Actually, I think I know what's going on with the Vivaldi blog group actor - it's not necessarily NodeBB's fault.

Inspecting the AP objects coming from vivaldi.com/blog, all the English-written blog posts have their as:audience field set to https://vivaldi.com/?author=0.

Meanwhile, every other blog post that is written in a different language instead have it set to https://vivaldi.com//?author=0, so for Japanese blog posts, for example, it is https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=0.

And all these URLs link to different group actors, but all of them have the same value on the preferredUsername and webfinger properties: blog, and [email protected].

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@AltCode okay! Thanks for reporting, it sounds like there are two issues going on:

1. Categories losing their handle-to-id association
   • Frustratingly, this read very similarly to #13283, and both remote users and categories share similar logic. I have so far not been able to reproduce it at all on local development.
2. Separate users (different IDs) sharing the same preferredUsername.
   • This is an interesting one, and I am not entirely sure where the fault lies. I wonder how other software handles it?

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@AltCode I forked this out to a new topic. I think it's time to loop @[email protected] into the conversation (at the very least so this could be potentially escalated).

Mattias, it seems that when the WPML and ActivityPub plugins are enabled together, notes federated out by the blog user in another language have different ids but the same preferredUsername.

e.g. [email protected]: https://vivaldi.com/?author=46 and https://vivaldi.com/ja/?author=46

NodeBB interprets this as two different users. Curiously, Mastodon does not, the second ID explicitly does not resolve.

So there can be two solutions here:

1. The underlying issue can be fixed by WordPress, the solution of which is out of scope (for me at least)
2. NodeBB can adopt whatever mechanism Mastodon is using... which is most likely that Mastodon does a two-way when asserting an ID, and ensures that the webfinger resource points to the ID.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

The remaining questions here are:

• whether preferredUsername is meant to be unique to the instance (in which case having multiple ids point to an identical preferredUsername would be a violation), and
• what exactly AP software should do when it encounters this situation... store a list of "known alias" IDs? There are potential security issues to doing so.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@AltCode all three flipboard remote categories seem to be working now

[altcode@community.nodebb.org]

This is getting out of hand! Now, there are six of them!

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@AltCode This should be fixed in the upcoming v4.3.0.

https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/13352

It won't proactively remove the duplicates, but they'll be pruned out within ~7 days.