Increase human-readability of invite links

WofWca · September 25, 2026, 7:10am

Expected behavior

You know what an invite link does (group invite, contact, etc) based on its text, without having to install/open Delta Chat and click on it.

Actual behavior

Links are not really human-readable.

I suggest this as an alternative (or an addition) to More detailed chat invite link preview.

Take a look at how links look currently: https://i.delta.chat/#F565A77295ADB383DE07BD7657CD1F9E8BB79431&v=3&i=p3nnrZMx-S7HNJ-ORZExzNsA&s=oXyyxAcIht1JWAcA-zpZdeti&a=abcdefghi%40nine.testrun.org&n=Bob.

Ways to improve things, off the top of my head:

Put the important stuff at the start and not the end
Use better separators for the parts of the link, e.g. _.
(maybe?) shorten the fingerprint by base64-encoding it instead of base16.
Though arguably it’s also a human-readable thing, so maybe no.
Consider not URL-encoding the link parts, e.g. the name could be Unicode?
Not sure if it’s valid.

Here is the current code:

github.com/chatmail/core

src/securejoin.rs

d8912a98a


      
                      "https://i.delta.chat/#{fingerprint}&v=3&x={grpid}&j={invitenumber}&s={auth}&a={self_addr_urlencoded}{r_param}&n={self_name_urlencoded}&b={chat_name_urlencoded}",
                  )
              } else {
                  format!(
                      "https://i.delta.chat/#{fingerprint}&v=3&x={grpid}&i={invitenumber}&s={auth}&a={self_addr_urlencoded}{r_param}&n={self_name_urlencoded}&g={chat_name_urlencoded}",
                  )
              }
          } else {
              let self_name_shortened = shorten_name(&self_name, 25);
              let self_name_urlencoded = utf8_percent_encode(&self_name_shortened, DISALLOWED_CHARACTERS)
                  .to_string()
                  .replace("%20", "+");
          
              context.sync_qr_code_tokens(None).await?;
              context.scheduler.interrupt_smtp().await;
          
              format!(
                  "https://i.delta.chat/#{fingerprint}&v=3&i={invitenumber}&s={auth}&a={self_addr_urlencoded}{r_param}&n={self_name_urlencoded}",

link2xt · September 25, 2026, 11:43am

Put the important stuff at the start and not the end

In this change important text was moved to the end on purpose, to make it easy to find:

github.com/chatmail/core

slightly nicer and shorter QR and invite codes (#7390)

main ← r10s/slighly-nicer-invite-links

opened 10:22AM - 03 Nov 25 UTC

r10s

+89 -43

- sort garbage to the beginning, readable text to the end - instead of `%20`, m…ake use of `+` to encode spaces - shorter invite links and smaller QR codes by truncation of the names - we do truncation by adding `..` percent encoded - not nice again, however, having a dot at the end of a URL is a call for trouble on linkifier (even though one can argue that a missed dot is okayish) the truncation of the name uses chars() which does not respect utf-8, so that last character may be wrong. not sure if there is a nice and easy alternative, but maybe it's good engoug - the real, full name will come over the wire (exiting truncate() truncates on word boundaries, which is maybe too soft here - names may be long, depending on the language, and not contain any space) moreover, this resolves the "name too long" issue from https://github.com/chatmail/core/issues/7015 (not saying, we really should put in the name to group invites tho)

davidsm10 · September 25, 2026, 1:45pm

Another similar improvement would be to render the DeltaChat links as a button when inside DeltaChat chats. Like “Chat with XYZ” or “Join group XYZ”.

Something similar is already shown after you click the link but I think it would be nice to render the links directly as a nice button.

deltahat · October 6, 2026, 5:14am

That could be nice aesthetically if it is rendered as a button but I see practical possible drawbacks, because a button is not so intuitive to copy or share to other messaging apps like a link is, which is probably the main reason to use links over vCards. Users might also get confused between links and vCards which are already rendered as buttons with “Chat with XYZ” text and then assume the behavior should be the same because they look similar in the chat when actually it is different.