It is said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, a quote often attributed to the American philosopher George Santayana. And to remember the past, records must be maintained and kept accessible to learn from. With this in mind, it is no wonder that archivists worldwide consider it crucial to ensure the archival records are both complete and accurate, with a constant frustration caused by the knowledge that the archives are neither due to challenges in tracking down and collecting what should be archived.
The last few days, I decided to simplify the collection of Messages from the Mattermost chat service, used by a few of the organisations I am involved in, to try to improve the situation slightly. To achieve this, I had written a dedicated extraction tool. Partly to see how hard it would be, and partly to ensure that if one of the services were shut down or replaced, everything in it would not be lost. Of course it is in the nature of the use of instant messages that most of them are not fit for permanent storage, at least not according to Norwegian law, where there is a threshold "worthy of the archive" (arkivverdig) that should be met, and messages like "should we go to lunch now" are below the bar and should be filtered out. The tool can not help with this filtering, and that will have to be done using other means after collection.
The tools I had my bullshit generator write, under strict supervision and many iterations, will extract every message visible to the user whose credentials are used to log into Mattermost, and write it out in Noark 5 extraction XML format and visualize the result. I created the visualiser mostly to quickly be able to debug the extracted XML, but also to make life easier for anyone interested in testing out the tool set.
The extractor mattermost-noark5extract create a hierarchy with arkiv/arkivdel for the Mattermost server, and then individual mappe for each channel and direct message chat, a registrering for each message thread, dokumentbeskrivelse for every message in the tread, and one or more dokumentobjekt for each message and their attachments/images. So far it is only tested on one Mattermost installation, where around 23,000 messages is extracted in 61 seconds and produce 295M with approximately 600 attachments and around 675,000 lines of XML in arkivstruktur.xml. You pass it the URL of the service, a username and password, a directory path where to store the collection and an optional channel name substring to limit the collection to only a subset of the messages available.
The mattermost-noark5extract-browser viewer can load this collection and visualize it similarly to Mattermost's web interface, with the list of channels and direct messages dialogues on the left, messages chronologically in the centre and a selected thread displayed on the right.
I know Mattermost provide several login options. I've only had the one used on my test server implemented so far, and know the extract tool will have to be extended a bit for it to handle servers using one of these options.
If you would like to examine the new toolkit, mattermost-noark5extract is available from gitlab. I wanted to put it on codeberg, but as the recent rule change forbid code mostly written by a bullshit generator there, it was not really an option. Note that some years ago I wrote a similar tool to extract material from the request tracker system. The source for request-tracker-noark5extract is also available from codeberg. I would love to hear from you if you test the tools.
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and wish to support my activities, please send donations to 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.