mc-webui/docs/whatsnew.md

What's New

User-facing summary of changes since the last main release. Maintained on dev and finalized before each merge to main.

For deep technical notes, see architecture.md. For the full git history, run git log.

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Unreleased (since fd2b3d0)

New features

• Custom Analyzer services. A new Settings → Analyzer tab lets you register your own MeshCore Analyzer services. Each entry has an enable/disable switch, a "star" toggle to mark it as the default, and an Edit/Delete pair. The chart icon under each group-chat message now resolves at click time: built-in Letsmesh if you haven't configured anything, the default service when one is set, or a chooser modal when several are enabled. URL templates use {packetHash} as a placeholder.
• Apply a saved path straight from Contact Info. Each entry in the Paths list inside the DM Contact Info modal gained an upload-arrow button. Click it to push that configured path to the device as the active route — no more switching to the console to run change_path.
• Database "Optimize now" button + live size. The Backup modal now shows the current DB size and exposes an Optimize now button that runs SQLite VACUUM on demand. Useful after a big retention pass when you want to reclaim space without waiting for the nightly job.
• Automatic message retention is on by default. A nightly job at 03:30 (using your container's TZ) trims old data: 90 days of channel messages and direct messages, 60 days of advertisements, and 30 days of diagnostic data (echoes, paths, acks — these account for the bulk of long-term DB growth). When at least 1 000 rows are deleted, the database is VACUUM-ed automatically so file size shrinks too.
• Smarter watchdog (host service). The host-level mc-webui-watchdog systemd service now catches a new failure mode — a "sluggish" device that briefly stalls on stats/battery commands while still receiving traffic — by counting soft-pattern hits over a 2-minute window. The app also exposes a new /health/strict endpoint that external monitors can poll.

Reliability & polish

• No more 10–15 s freezes on app load. The realtime channel used a transport that the dev server couldn't upgrade; we now stay on long-polling, which keeps real-time pushes working without the reconnect loop.
• Channel list stays complete when the device is slow. Channels are now read from the local cache rather than re-queried slot-by-slot, so a brief device stall no longer leaves you with just the Public channel after a refresh.
• Sending on a re-used channel slot now works after a deletion. When you delete a channel, the device compacts the remaining slots — until now the app kept using the old keys for that slot. We refresh the secret from the device just before each send.
• Region scopes work for all channels, not just slots 0–7. Channels stored in higher slots (e.g. #ubot, #swietokrzyskie) now accept scope changes.
• Multi-byte routing paths render correctly everywhere. Contact list, DM modal, retry status, console output — all now show 2-byte and 3-byte hops with the right hop count and byte size (e.g. D103,5E34 (2 hops, 2B)), where they previously truncated the path or rendered single-byte hops.
• Self-healing TCP connection. Long-lived TCP sessions against meshcore-proxy can degrade in ways the socket can't see — some commands silently time out while RX still trickles in. The app now detects this on a send failure and reconnects in-place, with a backup liveness watcher that triggers a reconnect when no RX event has been seen for 5 minutes.
• Settings analyzer modals: backdrop and URL wrapping. Add/edit/chooser modals now dim the Settings backdrop correctly, and long URLs in the Analyzer list no longer push controls off-screen on narrow mobile viewports.
• Console change_path accepts more formats and respects hop size. You can now use commas, spaces, or arrows between hex chunks (D103,5E34 / D103 5E34 / D1->90->05). For multi-byte paths, all chunks must be the same length — that length determines whether the path is sent as 1-, 2-, or 3-byte hashes.

Deploy notes

• After deploying this release, restart the host watchdog so it picks up the new soft-pattern detection:

  sudo systemctl restart mc-webui-watchdog.service
  

• The retention job runs the first time at 03:30 local. Your DB may shrink noticeably overnight — that's expected.

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How this file is maintained

This file is updated before each merge of dev → main. Each release section starts as "Unreleased" and is renamed/dated once the merge happens, then a fresh "Unreleased" section is opened at the top.

Sections are grouped roughly as:

• New features — things a user can find/click that didn't exist before
• Reliability & polish — fixes for problems users actually noticed, plus quality-of-life tweaks
• Deploy notes — anything the operator must do beyond the usual mcupdate

Internal refactors, code-level cleanups, and developer-only changes belong in git log and architecture.md, not here.