Integration of gateway owner information into various existing interfaces (CLI, API, package broker) for registered users

[Archer]

Hi,

creating and building a community consists to a large extent of finding all possible community members in a region, contacting them and building the community together. The second aspect is currently not supported by the missing function in the TtheThingsStack Community Edition. This leads to discontent in numerous communities, which is made clear by various forks (Chirpstack etc.) or inactivity.

In order to build up and expand the local communities in a consistent and targeted manner, we urgently need some features that were available in v2/ of the old community homepage, but unfortunately are no longer available.
There are exactly two functions.

1. The linking of the gateway operator

For all gateways, if the operator activates this option, the name or the link to the operator’s member profile should also be displayed.
Whether this feature is only visible to logged-in community members should be considered from the perspective of the GDPR, but is not relevant for the purposes of community development. 2.

2. The mail form in the member profiles

This form is the only way to contact operators of new or misconfigured gateways and is therefore of fundamental importance for building and maintaining communities.
Furthermore, this form can be used to ensure communication without having to know the mail address of the individual members. Access to this form can be restricted to registered users of the console.

Why do communities need this function?

• Numerous, especially new operators of gateways set this up, struggle alone for a certain length of time, lose interest and the gateways disappear from the map again. If it is possible to invite these new operators into a community in this way, the chance of strengthening TTN as a whole is significantly greater.
• New gateways with incorrect GPS coordinates or GPS factory settings, e.g. the Dragino factory in China, regularly appear. So far, the local community has usually taken care of such gateways, which is not possible now.

For this last topic, we would also like to have a way to contact the operators of gateways that have set the visibility to private. In order to meet the requirements of the GDPR, however, this should only be done in the form of concrete notifications to TTN and then by TTN directly. Concrete and verifiable reasons should be defined that allow TTN to intervene.

I have also opened an issue on this topic in Gitub and look forward to a constructive discussion of the topic here in the forum. Here the Link to Github

Steffen Gray
Initiator TTN Mitteldeutschland

This topic was discussed in advance with the following communities or their initiators, who support the content:

TTN Apeldoorn
TTN Halle-Saalekreis
TTN Harz
TTN Kiel
TTN München
TTN Osterland
TTN Paderborn
TTN Passau Freyung-Grafenau
TTN Rhein-Sieg
TTN Stuttgart
TTN Südschleswig
TTN Westsachsen
TTN Wiesbaden

[johan (Johan Stokking)]

Thanks @Archer for posting and coordinating with the community. We understand the need for this.

We actually have some internal issues open to contact community members (again). There was quite some abuse of this feature unfortunately, leading to spam score penalties on our @thethingsnetwork.org domain. And it didn’t make it in the first redesign of the website, but we’ll find out a way to reintroduce this feature.

For the gateway map, there’s a partly technical reason as we are transitioning from V2 to V3 and we have a few different concepts about gateway ownership and collaboration, but we’ll also address this.

[odsouza]

The whole V2 to V3 transition has been disruptive. We have a university project (over 60nodes) that now does not work. We had to pull them all down and try something in the workshop before putting them up again. Again latency is an issue causes us a problem. Because we are a University we are trying to hook on to Loroit, Thingsboard, etc just to do some addtional testing. We would also like to get some “mobile” nodes going. Is there one place we can resolve all these issues? Thank you immensely.

[Jeff-UK]

The Forum can be a goldmine for help and assistance with issues getting devices configured correctly and resolving connection problems with GW’s etc and the correct use of the varying underlying standards and overall network architecture. There is also a lot of prior coverage of integrating results/traffic from the core of TTN into other 3rd party integrations, dashboards, off network long term storage and data capture/databases etc. Getting running with another LoRaWAN network would be out of scope however and you will need to look to their forum or others.

Biggest problem though is we Forumites, volunteers, contributors and mods will need details! What are your issues? Have you used forum search? We do expect people to help themselves and use search before asking repeated questions that are oft covered…

It is well known and widely covered that TTN V2 was tolerant of loosely specified and (from LoRaWAN standards perspective) poorly behaved nodes and that TTS(CE) aka TTN V3 is a more stable and ‘professional’ more ‘standards’ based implementation and there can therefore be issues migrating some classes of devices or requirements to improve their firmware. Again forum search or discussion can help. The biggest change wrt latency is the move from 1 sec to 5 sec RX2 window for downlinks…more commonly seen in other networks. This is double edge sword as yes greater delay to down link message passing but also better for support over poorer or unpredictable backhaul connections esp. cellular etc or networks with long latencies of their own, also allows a bit more time for uplink message handling and decision making before responding via down link. But again downlinks should be used only sparingly if at all once device has joined (see TTN FUP).

That said… what’s your problem(s)?! (Note please respect the title of any thread and don’t hijack for unrelated issues…use forum search to find a more appropriate subject or category or if one doesn’t exist or seem to fit well feel free to start your own thread(s) please)

[descartes (Nick McCloud)]

@odsouza

The whole V2 to V3 transition has been disruptive. We have a university project (over 60nodes) that now does not work.

This was widely announced since the beginning of the year. As @Jeff-UK says, with some actual detail we can probably get you over the hump, but please travel hopeful, a can-do attitude makes it all the more pleasant for the volunteers trying to help.