Mark new FB rooms as Direct Chats on Matrix by default

[alexmat2on]

This would make sense, since Facebook chats are usually 1-1 direct chats. Then Riot will display the Matrix room under the "People" tab, which makes it useful for finding the new room.

[kfatehi]

Oh yeah are you aware if this is something we can do?

[tfreedman]

This is definitely something you can do, as matrix-appservice-irc does it. The question is just 'how'.

[kfatehi]

We looked into this yesterday and discovered it's a matter of defining m.direct for the matrix user's account_data. not as easy as room tags would have been, but still pretty easy to do. given how easy it is to do this in riot by clicking the user icon and selecting "direct chat", i dont think i'll be implementing it soon

[mijofa]

I've just been looking through the code to see if I can do anything about this as this is the main annoyance to me that is why I haven't moved away from my bitlbee based system (not the only one, just the main one).
Now from what I understand it, the only time a Matrix room is created is automatically by matrix-puppet-bridge when matrix-puppet-facebook tries to get the room info?
And when the room is created matrix-puppet-facebook has no way of knowing whether it already existed or if it just got created now?

If my understanding of both of those is correct, then I can't see any feasible point in the process for matrix-puppet-facebook to mark the room as direct. Not unless you mark them as direct every single time a new message is sent/received in a particular room, but then the user has no control over it anymore because the next message is just going to completely undo any change the user makes.

Aside from that kind of quick-and-dirty option, I believe this would require a change in the matrix-puppet-bridge library such that the getOrCreateMatrixRoomFromThirdPartyRoomId function would need to somehow be told whether it's a direct or group conversation so that it could do something about that at room creation time. At that point you could set the is_direct parameter when calling createRoom(). Perhaps also set the name of the room at this point?

[thomas-profitt]

#31 is relevant here. This is kinda-sorta a duplicate, but more limited in scope.

[mijofa]

Looks like the intended approach there will solve this problem, although apparently that has already been pushed so this should already be happening, yet I'm still seeing the bot joining all new rooms.

[mijofa]

So, I changed the code such that the is_direct value will eventually get passed to the createRoom call, and it kinda worked. New 1:1 conversations appeared as direct chat rooms, however only stayed there for a moment before switching back to a group room.
I'm not sure why this is happening, perhaps the room is automatically being unmarked as direct when an extra member is being added to the room?

Probably going to be another week or so before I try again, just dumping notes here for future me more than anything else