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 debb711)

New features

• My Repeaters — administer your repeaters from the browser. A new full-screen panel (main menu → My Repeaters) for the MeshCore repeaters you hold the password to. Add repeaters from your device's contacts, save the admin password once, and from then on logging in is one click — the app shows whether the repeater granted you ADMIN or GUEST rights. Each entry also gets the same path editor as DMs, so you can pin a direct route to make logins and commands fast. Heads-up: repeaters never answer a bad login, so a wrong password looks exactly like an unreachable repeater — the app's error messages say so instead of guessing.
• Monitoring tools per repeater: Status, Telemetry, Neighbors. After login you land in a management panel. Status shows battery, uptime, clock, RSSI/SNR/noise floor, packet counters, and channel utilization in one compact table. Telemetry lists every Cayenne LPP channel at once, with proper units. Neighbors shows every zero-hop node the repeater hears (name, last heard, SNR) — plus a map view that draws SNR-labeled links to the neighbours it can place. Works with guest logins too.
• Remote CLI, Settings, and Actions (admin logins). CLI is a real terminal to the repeater — quick-command chips, per-repeater history, round-trip times. Settings edits the repeater configuration in collapsible sections (Basic, Radio, Location, Features, Network health, Advertisement, Operator info, Advanced): values load live from the repeater, only the fields you change are sent, and every field reports back individually — including a "reboot required" badge for radio parameters and the firmware's own error text for rejected values. Actions covers zero-hop advert, flood advert (marked "not recommended" — high network load), clock sync, and a confirmation-guarded reboot in a Danger zone. Erasing the file system stays USB-serial-only by firmware design, and the panel says so.
• Observer mode — feed packet analyzers straight from mc-webui. The new Settings → Observer tab turns your node into a MeshCore observer: every packet the device overhears is published to one or more MQTT brokers in the standard meshcore-packet-capture format, so analyzer services (a self-hosted Corescope, letsmesh-style maps) see your local mesh traffic without a separate capture script or a dedicated second node. Configure brokers with host/port, optional username/password and TLS; each row shows a live connected/error badge, and the tab counts packets captured vs published in real time. Capture is completely passive — chat and direct messages are unaffected — and all changes apply immediately, no restart needed. (LetsMesh token-authenticated brokers are not supported yet.)
• Scheduled flood adverts. The Observer tab includes an optional advert interval in hours: the app sends a flood advert on that schedule so your observer stays visible on analyzer maps. The timer survives restarts, so a redeploy won't send an extra advert early. Set it to 0 to keep adverts fully manual.

Reliability & polish

• Console login reports your role. A successful repeater login in the Interactive Console now answers "Logged into X as admin" (or guest) instead of a bare success line.

Deploy notes

• This update adds a new Python dependency (paho-mqtt) and raises the meshcore library requirement to 2.3.7, so the Docker image must be rebuilt — the standard mcupdate flow does this automatically.
• Passwords you save in the app — MQTT broker credentials in the Observer tab and repeater admin passwords in My Repeaters — are stored in plain text in the app database. That's a deliberate trade-off for a private single-user LAN app; use dedicated credentials where you can.

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2026-07-02

New features

• Explicit Send on phones and tablets. On touch devices, pressing Enter now inserts a new line instead of sending — you tap the Send button to publish. This stops a mistapped Enter on the on-screen keyboard from firing off a half-typed message. Desktop keeps Enter-to-send. Applies to both group chat and direct messages.
• Manage the Letsmesh analyzer like any other entry. The built-in Letsmesh Analyzer is now a normal row in Settings → Analyzer — rename it, disable it, star it as the default, or delete it, just like a service you add yourself. The chart icon under a message resolves at click time: nothing enabled shows a "No analyzer configured" hint, a starred default (or a single enabled service) opens directly, and several enabled without a default show a chooser. The row's switch now reads Enabled when it's on.

Reliability & polish

• Multi-line direct messages keep their line breaks. A DM you sent across several lines showed correctly to the recipient but collapsed to a single line in your own copy. Your own bubble now preserves the line breaks too.

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2026-06-26

New features

• Resend a channel message (same packet). Your own group-chat messages now carry a repeat-arrow button that re-broadcasts the exact same packet. Repeaters that already forwarded it stay quiet, but nodes that never heard it can still pick it up — so a resend fills in coverage on the existing message's delivery badge instead of posting a duplicate. Requires companion firmware 1.16 or newer; the button is hidden on older devices.
• Clearer "Edit message" button. The button that copies a message back into the composer for hand-editing used to be mislabeled "Resend." It's now a pencil Edit message button on both channel and direct messages, clearly separate from the real Resend above.
• 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

• System Log tab no longer floods the server. Opening the System Log could trigger a feedback loop that hammered the server with 10+ requests a second; the log noise that caused it is now filtered out, so the tab stays quiet.
• The connection badge stops lying about device state. The status badge could flip back to "Connected" on a routine message refresh even while the device was actually disconnected. Device status is now driven only by real device connectivity, with a 60-second fallback check so a long-open tab stays accurate.
• Automatic recovery after a failed reconnect. A reconnect that failed quietly used to leave the app stuck "disconnected" until the container was restarted by hand. The background liveness watcher now keeps retrying instead of giving up after a single failure.
• 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.