A room server is a message board on a radio: it keeps its members' last
posts and sends each member the ones they missed. MeshTerm could see rooms
and run your own, but not join one. Posts that reached the radio were filed
as direct messages from the room, with their authors thrown away.
Chat now has a Rooms section between Channels and Direct. Opening a room
shows its board at once, each post under the member who wrote it. A post
carries the first four bytes of its author's key, so it is named by any
contact or overheard advert with that key and coloured by the key itself.
An author nothing names stands as the hash, in the unknown-node grey. The
first visit asks for the room's password over the board. After that,
opening a room logs in again only once it has been quiet for
room_relogin_minutes (a new preference, 30 by default), and ^L (F6 on the
handhelds) logs in on demand. The title says what the room allowed:
member, admin or read-only. A read-only member gets a line saying the room
drops their posts, in place of a compose box. A post goes out once, never
soft-retried, since a duplicate would reach every member.
Underneath: messages carry an author (schema 18), a room's board leaves
out its command replies, and a re-sent post is recorded once. Room posts
raise the unread badge and a room's command replies don't. The device
gains room_login, sharing admin_login's exchange and reading the access
the room granted. Room passwords are remembered in rooms.json; an admin
login is kept in admin.json, shared with Repeater admin. The simulator
has a room, Lakeside BBS, to join with "hello".
Two fixes the research turned up. An admin command took the first direct
message from anyone as its reply, so a room post or a companion's message
landing mid-command was read as the node's answer. It now listens before
sending, and only for a reply from that node that is not a post. And
Repeater admin names a room server's guest password "Room password", the
password members join with.
Refs: #24
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5.5
1ceda7e22f