docs(release-notes): v3.15.0

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -2,6 +2,19 @@
 
 ## [Unreleased]
 
+## [3.15.0] - 2026-10-22
+
+See [docs/release-notes/v3.15.0.md](docs/release-notes/v3.15.0.md) for the full notes. 77 commits since v3.14.0: 27 fix, 23 perf, 19 feat, 3 test, 2 ci, 2 docs, 1 chore.
+
+### Highlights
+- **Last Heard and node status count only certain evidence** (#2261, #2262, closes #2260) - a shared 1-byte relay hop no longer keeps a silent repeater "Active". New status `uncertain`. **Operator awareness required**: statuses, `last_heard` and offline mails change after the upgrade.
+- **`users.db` migrates to schema v6 with user accounts on** (#2174) - a v3.14.x binary refuses it afterwards, so keep the pre-upgrade backup for a rollback.
+- **The ingestor runs a key backfill at every start** (#2133) and refreshes planner statistics at most once per 24 h (#2158).
+- **Optional LoRa radio settings per node** (#2209, #2210), observer TX airtime (#2208), companion linking (#2174 to #2176), adaptive offline mails (#2262).
+- **Packet store memory and request latency** (#2146 and 23 perf commits) - e.g. startup to ready 31 s to 21 s (#2181), `/api/nodes` p95 165.4 to 114.4 ms (#2165).
+
+No manual migration step.
+
 ## [3.14.0] - 2026-10-08
 
 See [docs/release-notes/v3.14.0.md](docs/release-notes/v3.14.0.md) for the full notes. 23 commits since v3.13.1: 13 fix, 8 feat, 1 ci, 1 docs.

docs/release-notes/v3.15.0.md

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+# v3.15.0
+
+77 commits since v3.14.0: 27 fix, 23 perf, 19 feat, 3 test, 2 ci, 2 docs (one of them
+these notes), 1 chore. Nineteen feats, so minor not patch.
+
+The main change is how CoreScope decides that a repeater is alive. Until now a
+repeater could stay green for days after it went silent, because traffic from
+another repeater with the same short prefix was counted for it. That is fixed, and
+it changes the status of some of your nodes after the upgrade. The rest of the
+release is optional features (LoRa settings per node, observer airtime, companion
+linking, smarter offline mails) and a lot of memory and speed work on the server.
+
+## Read this before upgrading
+
+### Some repeaters change from Active to Uncertain or Stale
+
+A repeater in a path is only known by the first 1, 2 or 3 bytes of its key. With
+1-byte paths, dozens of repeaters share the same prefix, and CoreScope counted a
+hop like that as "heard" for whichever repeater it picked. A repeater that had been
+off for days could stay Active on traffic that was really another one.
+
+Since #2261 (closes #2260), a node only counts as heard on evidence that can only
+be that node: its own packets, or a relay hop whose prefix no other repeater has.
+Adverts with an invalid signature no longer count either.
+
+What you will see after the upgrade:
+
+- **A new grey status, Uncertain**, for a repeater or room that sent nothing certain
+  in its silent window, while its shared prefix still shows up in paths. It may be
+  that repeater, or another one with the same prefix. The nodes list and the map have
+  a filter button for it, and the map dims these nodes like stale ones.
+- **Last Heard can be older than before** for repeaters that are only heard through a
+  shared prefix.
+- **Offline mails for watched nodes** now go out for repeaters that a namesake kept
+  green before. The mail says when the node is uncertain rather than gone.
+- **Node analytics** split the activity chart into certain and uncertain traffic, and
+  Availability and Longest Silence use only the certain part (#2262).
+
+On a staging instance with 1,682 repeaters and rooms, on the day of the change: 1,497
+Active, 117 Uncertain, 68 Stale. We did not count the same instance before the change.
+
+Right after a restart, fewer nodes show Uncertain and more show Stale. The first load
+skips ambiguous relay hops (#1643), so they come back as live traffic arrives. Give
+it a few hours before you judge a node.
+
+Nothing to configure. A node's own packets, such as its adverts, always count, so a
+repeater that adverts within its silent window stays Active. If a node you know is
+on the air shows Uncertain or Stale, its prefix is shared with another repeater and
+its last advert is older than that window.
+
+### With user accounts on: back up `users.db` first
+
+`users.db` is migrated to schema version 6 at the first start (#2174). A v3.14
+binary refuses to open it after that. To roll back, you need the copy from before
+the upgrade: the daily backups in `backups/` next to `users.db`, or your own. Without
+user accounts nothing changes.
+
+### The ingestor fills in channel and scope names in the background
+
+When you add a channel key or a region key, packets stored before that keep showing
+as an encrypted channel or an unknown scope. From this release the ingestor goes back
+over those rows and fills in the name (#2133). It runs at every start and again when
+keys are added, and creates three small tables to keep track. The server picks up
+the result without a restart. There is no measured duration for a large database
+yet.
+
+### Some answers are a few seconds or minutes older, in return for speed
+
+- The **nodes list** is shared between identical requests for up to 15 seconds
+  (#2165). A geo-filter or blacklist change clears it at once.
+- The **neighbor graph** is rebuilt in the background every 5 minutes
+  (`neighborGraph.cacheRecomputeIntervalSeconds`, default 300) instead of while a
+  page waits (#2222). One rebuild took about 11 seconds before, on a page load.
+- Server caches that have expired keep serving the old value while one refresh runs
+  (#2147).
+
+### Hop names and regions can shift
+
+Several changes make hop names and region membership more accurate, so some will
+look different after the upgrade:
+
+- 104 airport codes for Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and France were
+  added to the region table (#2188, closes #2098). Narrowing a hop by the observer's
+  region is now only applied to the hop the observer heard directly.
+- A node is placed in a region by where it is heard zero-hop first, then by the
+  fewest hops, up to 3 (#2190, closes #1879). Before, it went to every region whose
+  observers heard it.
+- Zero-hop adverts on a transport-direct route are now recognised (#2234, closes
+  #2225).
+- The packet detail and the map route view resolve 1-byte hops as one whole path
+  instead of hop by hop; a hop that matches no known node shows as "unlisted"
+  (#2245).
+- An observer's own transmissions no longer count as something it received, in Heard
+  By and in the neighbor graph (#2220).
+
+### Docker: a geo-filter save on a single-file config mount now fails visibly
+
+If you mount `config.json` as a single file, saving the geo filter now returns an
+error (#2137). Before, it wrote a copy inside the container that the next start threw
+away. Mount the directory instead. A symlinked `config.json` is now written through.
+
+## LoRa settings and airtime
+
+- **LoRa radio settings per node** (#2209, closes #1268) - the node page shows the
+  frequency, spreading factor, bandwidth and coding rate the node reports on the
+  MeshCore map. Off until you set `rfParams.nodesUrl`.
+- **Nodes with different settings than their neighbours** (#2210) - a LoRa badge and a
+  `?lora=differs` filter on the nodes list for a node whose settings differ from the
+  nodes within 50 km (`rfParams.compareRadiusKm`). Useful to find a repeater that was
+  set up on the wrong preset.
+- **Observer TX airtime** (#2208, closes #661) - a "TX 1h" column on the observers list
+  and a tile on RF Health show how much of the last hour an observer spent
+  transmitting, with a warning above 10% (`dutyCycleWarnPct`).
+
+## Notifications and accounts
+
+These only apply with user accounts on.
+
+- **Smarter offline mails** (#2262) - off by default
+  (`userManagement.notifications.adaptiveOffline`). It learns how long each watched
+  node is normally silent, and mails about 30 minutes into a real outage instead of
+  after the fixed window.
+- **Alerts from an external feed** (#2178, closes #2177) - point
+  `userManagement.notifications.externalAlerts` at a JSON feed, and watched nodes in
+  it get a mail.
+- **Link a companion to your account** (#2174, #2175, #2176) - a companion app logs in
+  with a device token. With `clientRxCoverage.requireLinkedCompanion`, coverage is only
+  taken from linked companions, and the account page lists your companions with a "My
+  coverage" view.
+- **Postal as mail provider** (#2154) - `userManagement.mail.provider: "postal"`, next
+  to Brevo.
+- Re-registering with a pending account updates password and name together (#2253,
+  closes #2228).
+
+## Coverage and companions
+
+- **Where a companion drove and heard nothing** (#2172) - the Mobile RX coverage page
+  shows gaps next to receptions, for instances with `clientRfSamples`.
+- **Repeaters known only by the name a companion reported** (#2239) - opt in with
+  `clientNodeNames.enabled`. Names that companions report are used in hop resolution
+  and shown on the map at an estimated position.
+- **Faster reach report** (#2214) - opt in with `retention.hopIndexDays`. In the
+  benchmark one reach scan went from 816 ms to 293 ms; the index took about 2 GB on a
+  large database. The reach page now retries when the server is busy instead of
+  showing an error (#2250).
+
+## Scopes and regions
+
+- **Scope Audit transport view** (#2167, #2169) - next to what repeaters declare, a
+  view of every repeater actually seen forwarding a scope.
+- **Region filter on Scope Audit** (#2171), for both views.
+- **`?region=` in a link works on every page** (#2256, closes #2255) - not only on
+  packets. Handy for links from a regional website or a Discord post.
+- **Region quick picks** (#2170) - `regionQuickPicks` adds groups of regions to the
+  region control, for example a country.
+
+## Pages and packets
+
+- **Pages no longer show an answer for an earlier visit** (#2248, closes #2200, #2218,
+  #2230) - when you clicked on quickly, a slow answer could replace the page you were
+  on. Node analytics, analytics and the account page are fixed.
+- **Packets** - the node filter keeps your pick on a slow click (#2244, closes #2243),
+  grouped mode reloads when you change the observer filter (#2242, closes #2241), and
+  live packets respect the channel filter (#2192, closes #2191).
+- **Analytics** - Packets / Hour is readable on long histories (#2194, closes #2193),
+  and Route Patterns hides blacklisted and hidden nodes (#2189, closes #2184).
+- **Node analytics say which period they cover** (#2211) - for 30 days and All, the
+  rates are computed over the packets in memory, and the page says from when. On one
+  staging node the 30-day availability went from 19.3% to 83.3%, because days outside
+  memory counted as silent before.
+- **Route view** - "N hops" counts only real hops (#2240, closes #2206), and the sender
+  and recipient decoded from the payload are marked as such (#2207).
+- **Favorites and home cards use the role's thresholds** (#2215) - a repeater is shown
+  as degraded after 24 hours and silent after 72, the same as on its node page,
+  instead of after 1 and 24.
+- **The region filter matches packets loaded in the background** (#2185) - with
+  `hotStartupHours`, packets loaded after startup now carry the observer region.
+- **`?theme=dark` or `?theme=light`** in a link sets the theme for that page load
+  (#2251, closes #2236).
+
+## Faster and lighter
+
+A large part of this release is work on the request path (#2146) and the packet
+store's memory. What you notice:
+
+- Startup to ready went from 31 to 21 seconds on one instance (#2181).
+- The packet store uses less memory: for example 948 to 767 MB for the route
+  patterns index (#2182) and 581 to 535 MB heap from sharing observer strings (#2183).
+- The nodes list: p95 from 165 to 114 ms (#2165).
+- Scope statistics for the last hour: 3.08 seconds to 16 ms (#2166).
+- One reach query: 14.1 to 1.9 seconds (#2155).
+- The ingestor lets live packets through between retention batches (#2153, closes
+  #2151), and runs the database statistics refresh at most once a day, where one run
+  took almost 8 minutes (#2158).
+- Hidden browser tabs stop polling the server for the navigation counters (#2162).
+- Opt-in `analytics.pauseWhenIdle` skips analytics nobody looks at (#2164).
+
+The other pull requests in this group are #2147, #2156, #2157, #2163, #2186, #2187,
+#2195 to #2199, #2201, #2222, #2224, #2246, #2247.
+
+## Docker and ingestor
+
+- **Run the services as a normal user** (#2125, #2235) - set `RUN_AS_UID` and
+  `RUN_AS_GID`. Without them the services run as root, as before.
+- An interrupted background migration in the ingestor is retried at the next start
+  instead of being marked as failed (#2161).
+
+## Tests, CI and docs
+
+- Frontend coverage now counts every E2E suite (#2204, closes #2203), and the README
+  badges update again (#2202, closes #2136).
+- Local test runs no longer depend on the CI environment (#2160, closes #2159), and two
+  flaky E2E checks are stable (#2179, #2180).
+- The README is corrected and lists the optional features (#2205). `SECURITY.md`
+  explains how to report a vulnerability (#2257).
+
+## Issues closed
+
+29 issues, from the 76 pull requests in this range. Collected from each pull
+request's closing references rather than from commit text.
+
+- #661 feat: airtime utilization estimates per observer
+- #1268 feat: enrich nodes with LoRa RF params from map.meshcore.io
+- #1879 bug: /api/nodes region filter attributes by observer, not repeater home region
+- #2098 iata-coords: none of the 42 observers' codes are in the table
+- #2136 README badges stale since June: BADGE_PUSH_TOKEN returns 401
+- #2146 Request-path latency grows with DB size
+- #2148 perf: avoid allocation-class padding in retained observations
+- #2151 perf: let live ingestion run between retention batches
+- #2159 test: local validation assumes Actions environment and POSIX file modes
+- #2177 Notifications: optional external node alerts feed
+- #2184 nodeBlacklist is not applied to Route Patterns
+- #2191 Packets page: live WebSocket packets ignore the channel filter
+- #2193 Analytics: Packets / Hour chart unreadable on long-retention instances
+- #2200 Analytics: older requests can overwrite newer filters or a later page visit
+- #2203 Frontend coverage counts only 2 of the E2E suites
+- #2206 Route view: DM sender/recipient rows drawn as ordinary hops
+- #2218 bug(node analytics): delayed responses overwrite the page after navigation
+- #2219 perf: cold region and area lookups still hold the packet-store lock
+- #2221 perf: /api/nodes/{pubkey}/neighbors rebuilds the neighbor graph on the request path (~11 s)
+- #2223 perf: /api/nodes/{pubkey}/paths runs two queries per transmission
+- #2225 bug: zero-hop detection reads the path byte at the wrong offset for transport-direct adverts
+- #2228 bug(accounts): make pending registration updates atomic and status-conditional
+- #2230 bug(account): delayed session initialization replaces the page after navigation
+- #2236 Feature Request: Dark Mode set via URL parameter
+- #2237 server: data races between ingest and HTTP readers
+- #2241 Packets: observer filter only takes effect after a page reload (grouped mode)
+- #2243 Packets: picking a node suggestion sometimes does nothing
+- #2255 ?region= in the URL only works on the packets page
+- #2260 Node liveness counts ambiguous 1-byte hops: a silent repeater shows "Active"
+
+## Contributors
+
+Pull request authors: @efiten (33), @A13xB0 (24), @nullrouten0 (6), @n30nex (4),
+@anieto (3), @CoderNemesis26 (2), @hermes-gadget (2), @SaarMesh-Bot (2).
+
+No co-authors other than tooling are credited in the commits.
+
+Issues in this release were reported by @efiten (13), @n30nex (8), @anieto (2),
+@A13xB0 (1), @dborup (1), @hermes-gadget (1), @Kpa-clawbot (1), @n1ghtBl00d (1),
+@SaarMesh-Bot (1).
+
+## Upgrade notes
+
+- No manual migration step.
+- With user accounts on, keep a copy of `users.db` from before the upgrade (see above).
+- Everything new is off until you set it: `rfParams.nodesUrl`,
+  `clientNodeNames.enabled`, `retention.hopIndexDays`, `analytics.pauseWhenIdle`,
+  `regionQuickPicks`, `userManagement.notifications.adaptiveOffline` and
+  `.externalAlerts`, `clientRxCoverage.requireLinkedCompanion`,
+  `userManagement.mail.provider: "postal"`, and `RUN_AS_UID` / `RUN_AS_GID` for
+  Docker. The example values are in `config.example.json`.