Motivation

As a platform serving dining needs, we constantly need to keep up to date with the restaurants that people want to try. Users may see restaurants on other platforms like tiktok, instagram and google.

Hence we would like to provide a way for users to send us links to restaurants they are interested in. From there, we will process it and add it to our database. This way, users are able to use our platform to aggregate the restaurants they are interested in and enjoy the different features that our platform provides.

Goals

We set out the following goals:

  1. simple to use
  2. minimal hassle to user
  3. platform agnostic

Details

The user flow requires the user to share with us the link to the place of interest or the restaurant name. If we can control the world, we of course want the user to be nice and send us everything. However, we don’t control the world (yet). So we need an alternative solution.

Proposed solution

We will leverage on other social media platform’s capability to share links between apps for this solution. Users can click on the share button on popular apps and send the link to a telegram bot. The bot will be connected to our backend to complete the processing.

Currently in phase 1, our solution will involve auto processing of platforms and manual processing of restaurant information. This way we can prioritize links from certain platforms to be processed.

User flow

Sharing link to bot

  1. User sees a restaurant they like on a third party platform.
  2. Clicks on share button on third party platform
  3. Chooses the bot on telegram in share window
  4. Link is sent to bot for processing

Connecting the bot to user

  1. Generate a special join link
    • join link will lead them to the bot with a exclusive token that expires in 10mins
    • token is stored in cache
    • warning to user that this token should not be shared.
  2. User clicks on link to start the bot
  3. Bot backend will create a DB entry to link user to the telegram userID
    • this will allow us to show the connection and give users ability to remove the connection
    • this is for future proofing.
    • we may want to add the restaurant directly to the users list when they send it to us (maybe only)

Platforms

We would prefer to accept links from all platforms. However, due to security reasons, we will start with the following and expand in the future:

  1. google maps
  2. instagram
  3. tik tok

FE Mock ups

  • New entry point in navigation bar when user is authenticated

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  • generation of link and show list of telegram accounts connected to user

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Technical limitations

In an ideal world, we would want to automate the scraper. However, we currently value accurate information rather than efficiency. Hence a semi-automated worked flow is developed to assist in ingesting the links.

Links to a restaurant should be ingested only once. If the same link or link to the same restaurant comes again from another user, we will not need to process it again. This will ensure we process all restaurants only once.

Requirements

  1. Build a telegram bot that will take in verified links from the following platforms

    • instagram
    • google maps
    • tiktok

  2. Processing data

    • an admin window showing all links that have been sent
    • the view should be sorted to different tabs by the status of the process
    • admin view should also send a response to the sender when the processing is complete with the link to where he can find the data

Status

[>] In Review
[-] Technical Design
[-] Development
[-] Testing
[-] Live