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lu4t edited this page Oct 7, 2022 · 39 revisions
  • Qs: When and why is whin going End Of Life (EOL)?
  • As: Dec 2022. The reason is simple: whin was born as a side project that was designed to be used by a handful of users (for the maintainers, our friends and family). It was not engineered to handle well over 1M requests daily (real numbers from August 2022). As a consequence we decided to stop patching the back-end here and there, and build it again from scratch. We evaluated the options we had, and making it backwards compatible was too complex for a service that, at the end of the day, is FREE. So the decision we made was a complete "rip and replace". Our expectation is having the new back-end ready before EOLing the current version of whin. You can start trying WHIN v2 through rapidAPI. While nodes are being released, you can start using the service with simple NR core nodes. Take a look at this post: https://discourse.nodered.org/t/whin-whatsapp-gateway-new-version-beta and please share your thoughts.
  • Qs: Do I need to register as a user? Do you need any PII from me as a user? Do I need to share with you any kind of user/psw?
  • As: Same answer for all questions: No.
  • Q: How much time do you need to route a message to/from whatsapp Realm?
  • A: We are performance and metrics freaks, and we take time to deliver very seriously. If you suffer a delay over 1 second, let us know... there must be something not working on our side.
  • Q: Is this service reliable?, can I count on it running 99.999% of the time?
  • A: Short answer is: No. TL,DR: the backend service whin needs to run is "shared", and you are sharing it with "us": the maintainers. We are quite confident it is rock-solid, and could achieve a 99.999% SLA easily... BUT we're NOT providing a service, and this is NOT a business for us. As a consequence, we could (and will) pause the service at anytime - we tend to do it on the weekends. In fact we pause it everytime we want to roll-out, or test, new features we're building as part of the service whin is providing us and our home-Labs. That said, when we're not around, the backend is up and running all of the time. We rolled out a "status" page to inform about planned outages, you can check out here: https://status.inutil.info/history/whin
  • Q: Can I send json data to WhatsApp with whin-node?.
  • A: Of course you can. Actually you can do both: send and receive json data. Just make sure your flows are transforming payload data type to string (json2string), before sending the message.
  • Q: Are the messages of whin-send secured?.
  • A: Short answer is: it depends; TL,DR: your phone number and token will be sent ssl-encrypted over https to our proxy server; the server is the relay we share with you for free, to connect to whatsapp. If you are sending something you consider "private", or you have any concern of a Man-in-The-Middle inspection of the payload you send over our relay, we strongly recommend you encrypt the payload with a good cypher library. We will be happy to deliver the encrypted payload to your end. In other words, we cannot care less about the content of your messages. We do not watch, nor inspect, the content of our users messages, but obviously you should not trust on the wild internet.
  • Q: Are the messages received in whin-receive or whin-confirm secured?
  • A: When we receive a message from you in our gateway, the message uses Whatsapp end-2-end encryption. We use Blowfish encryption to rely from our backend. whin-receive will connect to our backend through a secure websocket. The message that will travel was previously encrypted with a combination of your token and will hit your NR encrypted. whin-receive will desencrypt the message for you with the same Blowfish algorithm. Again, while this delivers some consistent privacy to your communications, this ain't military-class security. You may use further encryption methods or avoid this channel for secret content.
  • Q: Is the whin node a whatsapp client?.
  • A: No, it is a 2-way communication method between your NR and our backend. We host a whatsapp client that will be sending and receiving messages to/from you. Outgoing messages will be sent by our gateway to your number, assuming you asked us to in the signup step.
  • Q: Do I have to install Puppeteer, Chromium, Phantom (or something similar) for whin-node to run?
  • A: No, you don't have to. Please see previous answer.
  • Q: how much HD space do I need on my drive to run whin?.
  • A: As of the time I am writing these lines, whin takes less than 200 KB. You will NOT find any thick-client based alternative that takes less that 150 MB (yes: MB) off your HD. This rational makes whin a good choice for devices with low resources that still want to use whatsapp to send/receive messages.
  • Q: why should I use whin instead of Telegram?
  • A: You don't have to. We are long time users of Telegram nodes; tired of listening people saying: "... it's awesome, if only I could access that through Whatsapp..." we have created a service that we wanted for ourselves and believe in sharing it for free to other users; our attempt is to host and run the service at zero cost for everyone.
  • Q: what data do you keep?
  • A: the short answer is: as little as we can. Our data logs are removed after 30 days no matter what, we're not willing to pay for long-time retention to our cloud provider. We collect logs we use to monitor the service; again, we do NOT collect/store long-term anything, and this statement includes: phone numbers, tokens and messages.
  • Q: Do you have an Abuse policy?
  • A: Yes; we will block as much as we can anyone who is abusing our service. The main one is people sending hundreds of msgs per hour. As a consequence we set an hourly rate limit to 10 messages per user. When you reach 10 msg in one hour you need to wait, otherwise whin wont work for you. If you have any issues, please reach to us using any of the contact methods on our website.
  • Q: Is there a self-hosted version of whin?
  • A: Not yet; we have not invested time to create a step-by-step guide to teach you how to deploy the whin backend on a selfhosted environment. Until this happens, you need to keep using the shared number approach.
  • Q: If I lose the token, how do I recover it?
  • A: If you lose the token, just send a "signup" text to whin, and you'll get it again. Any user will eventually "lose" the token after 30 days of inactivity... anytime you send a message through whin, the 30 days count-down starts.
  • Q: Who is supporting the cost of running the service?, is there any internet BOT used behind it?.
  • A: Whin is free to use, by design. Whin is not a bot but a whatsapp shared gateway, and behind it you would find the bridge we're using for our home-Labs; we decided to share it with the community. The cost of running whin is supported by its designers and maintainers, who don't have plans to change the principle of not charging anyone for using the gateway.
  • Qs: I am running a business and I like whin, can I use it to support some of my business processes?
  • As: You can use whin for your business if you wish, it's free. However, we (the maintainers) are NOT part of your business, and we cannot care less about how it goes. If we stop whin for whatever reason, do not react as if we were part your IT Team cause we are NOT.
  • Qs: what can I do if the shared number is banned?
  • As: Nothing, this service wont work anymore.
  • Qs: From time to time I have receive messages from whin from a different phone number than the one used to signup and get my token. Am I doing something wrong on my side, or is it how whin works?
  • As: The whin free gateway is using always the same number to deliver and listen to messages. However, when we do some testing, roll out new features, or perform system upgrades, sometimes we switch to a different number to avoid delivery disruptions to the whin users community... This is not always the case, we switch numbers only when we believe it is going to take us more than an hour or so to complete our testings. Nevertheless, the wild internet is full of scams and spammers; if you ever receive weird things associated with whin, we strongly recommend opening an issue on the repo and let us know. Also, you always can block the number sending you a whatsapp.
  • Qs: is there any limit on the service?.
  • As: Yes. Due to users abusing, we set an hourly rate limit of 10 messages per user. When you reach 10 msg in one hour your msgs will not be delivered till the timer is reset. Whin will send you a reminder of the limit as a response of each request. If you don't adjust how your runtime works and get to 50 msgs in 1 hr, your IP will be blocked and your phone number blacklisted. This is something we implemented as a consequence of the abuse usage of the service.
  • Qs: what happens if go over the 50 msg/hr limit?.
  • As: Your token will be removed, and your whatsapp number will be blacklisted for abusing whin. If you feel like you deserve another chance, you can send an email to info@inutil.info to let us know why you got banned, and why you wont be banned again; if we agree to remove your number from our blacklist, we will let you know and you will be able to signup again.
  • Qs: If I am a rapidAPI's whin subscriber, what happens if I reach any of the anti-abuse limits?.
  • As: Whin users who are coming from rapidAPI freemium subscriptions, don't have any limits or filters. All requests coming from rapidAPI are "whitelisted", meaning there's no anti-abuse filter applied. If for some reason a user experience any limitation, please let us know: info@inutil.info as there must be a bug on whin's back-end.
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