Weird text formats in Slack messages

[ifosch]

When a user writes a message, Slack applies some formatting to it in some cases which is rendered to text in a weird way.

One example of this is when a user writes someting that looks like a full Internet hostname, like host.example.com, Slack automatically converts the text to be a link to the corresponding URL (https://host.example.com). This happens on send, even if the user removes the link before sending!

This links renders to text in something like <https://host.example.com|host.example.com>, and it gets included in the text the bot is receiving like that, making Message Processor's parsing quite more complex or buggy.

Another example is when the message includes a mention, which looks similar to <@U90908AEBF>, and it is also pretty useless. In this case, however, I haven't found any big issue yet.

One approach to solve this could be to add a cleanup/resolution layer before sending the message to the MP, so these cases could be overwritten with more valid and adequate information.

[miguelbernadi]

I'd go for extracting, unifying and thoroughly testing the message parser to get rid of these instances. It is likely this will keep changing over time and we may also want to keep some of those behaviours.

[ifosch]

I think your proposal is interesting, as the number of packages with message processors is growing. However, I'm uncertain how much separated should Slack message parsing and Message Processor selection and arguments gathering be. I'm not sure if those are two separated responsibilities or just the same. I'm open for suggestions and proposals about this. I'll try to bring some ideas once I solved #26.