This particular commit has been a long time coming. For reference,
!avatar(email) was an undocumented syntax that simply rendered an
inline 50px avatar for a user in a message, essentially allowing
you to create a user pill like:
`!avatar(alice@example.com) Alice: hey!`
---
Reimplementation
If we decide to reimplement this or a similar feature in the future,
we could use something like `<avatar:userid>` syntax which is more
in line with creating links in markdown. Even then, it would not be
a good idea to add this instead of supporting inline images directly.
Since any usecases of such a syntax are in automation, we do not need
to make it userfriendly and something like the following is a better
implementation that doesn't need a custom syntax:
` Alice: hey!`
---
History
We initially added this syntax back in 2012 and it was 'deprecated'
from the get go. Here's what the original commit had to say about
the new syntax:
> We'll use this internally for the commit bot. We might eventually
> disable it for external users.
We eventually did start using this for our github integrations in 2013
but since then, those integrations have been neglected in favor of
our GitHub webhooks which do not use this syntax.
When we copied `!gravatar` to add the `!avatar` syntax, we also noted
that we want to deprecate the `!gravatar` syntax entirely - in 2013!
Since then, we haven't advertised either of these syntaxes anywhere
in our docs, and the only two places where this syntax remains is
our game bots that could easily do without these, and the git commit
integration that we have deprecated anyway.
We do not have any evidence of someone asking about this syntax on
chat.zulip.org when developing an integration and rightfully so- only
the people who work on Zulip (and specifically, markdown) are likely
to stumble upon it and try it out.
This is also the only peice of code due to which we had to look up
emails -> userid mapping in our backend markdown. By removing this,
we entirely remove the backend markdown's dependency on user emails
to render messages.
---
Relevant commits:
- Oct 2012, Initial commit c31462c278
- Nov 2013, Update commit bot 968c393826
- Nov 2013, Add avatar syntax 761c0a0266
- Sep 2017, Avoid email use c3032a7fe8
- Apr 2019, Remove from webhook 674fcfcce1
This commit carves out the overview for incoming webhooks and
moves it to its own file. This is a much better way to structure
these docs.
This is a quick follow-up to Tim Abbott's comment on #9592.
Anders Kaseorg
Rohitt Vashishtha
Tim Abbott
Stefan Weil
Tim Abbott
Rishi Gupta
Eeshan Garg