Mutiny Community Version 5.10 Dev Notes - 2024/12/09

Been a while since there was a significant update to this BBS.  This version has two changes.  Both are related what (I think) might be largely to blame for a dropoff in user engagement.

First, I did some analysis and saw that the majority of users were using ASCII (not ANSI) even though I'm pretty sure most people are calling with SyncTerm or other ANSI compliant term programs.  Therefore I have added a simple "Does your terminal support ANSI" on connection, right after the Backspace (CBM/ATASCII) check.

Hidden feature, if you press 'Y' instead of backspace it skips the "Do you support ANSI" question and assumes the answer is yes.

Second, I have no doubt that the "you have (over) 20,000 unread messages" is pretty daunting to new users feeling like catching up is impossible and not knowing how to skip those messages and just read the more recent stuff (easy enough to do but you have to know how first) just log out without actually doing anything.

So to that end I have added a chat archiving system.  Basically how it works is that you can either show or hide archived messages (hidden by default).  When archived messages are hidden you'll see the most recent 50 and/or the most recent 30 days worth.  So a channel can have more than 50 (unarchived) messages but only if they are less than 30 days old.

If, however, after hiding older messages, there's less than 50 to show then it will select the 50 most recent regardless of age.  Of course some channels don't have that many so it'll just not filter those channels at all.

The /archive command can be used to toggle whether the archive is "unlocked" (you're not filtering anything) or "locked" (default: you are filtering).

This is not persistent, at least not at this time, so if you unlock the archive (disable hiding/filtering) then log out/back in, then the messages are filtered again.  My thinking is you would probably only be interested in the most recent messages except for when following a thread back (like /re) or just curious and want to read the backlog.

There are conditions where alerts will indicate that there might be older messages and suggest using /archive, such as using '/0' or '/first' or reading backwards with '<' and trying to go before message #0.

I'll be keeping a close eye on this because there is some potential for problems as the in-memory cache of chat messages was shared between all sessions (to save memory) but now each session can have their own subset depending on if they are showing/hiding archived messages.
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