docs/website/UPGRADE_NOTES.md

Upgrade notes — website

Operator-facing. Newest first. One entry per change that requires an operator to do something, or that changes behaviour they would otherwise discover by accident.

Most upgrades need nothing: the schema is replayed on every boot with IF NOT EXISTS migrations, and a deployment that pulls a new image and restarts is done. This file exists for the exceptions — and the exceptions worth writing down are almost always the ones that fail quietly, because a loud failure announces itself and a quiet one does not.

Read the entries between the version you are on and the version you are moving to. Each names the action, whether it is required, and what happens if you do nothing.

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Engagement: rules, an in-app inbox, and three things that arrive switched off

Required. The engagement workstream, Phases 1–12. Three separate actions, and the two that matter most are the ones nothing will tell you about.

What changed

The site now has a general notification engine. A trigger fires (a forum post, a house going IDOC, a governor being appointed), a rule decides who hears about it and through which channel, and a template decides what it says. All of it is admin-editable under Admin → Engagement — Rules, Audiences, Templates, Triggers, Send Log and Suppressions.

Players get an in-app inbox at Account → Notifications, with per-channel switches at Account → Notification settings, and the same inbox in the Android app.

What you must do

Three things, in this order. The first is a required upgrade step for anyone running a shard; the second and third are only required if you were relying on the behaviour they change.

1. Update the shard — the wire protocol is now 5

Required if this deployment has a shard connected. Update in this order:

1. the website (this image),
2. the UO module to 0.5.0 — Admin → Modules, paste the 0.5.0 release install-manifest URL, then restart the server: modules are read from disk at boot, so nothing changes until you do. It declares coreApi ^1.9.0, and a core older than that will refuse to load it (the install itself still succeeds) — the module then shows as failed on that screen, naming the version it needs. That is the check working, but it means step 1 has to be finished first;
3. the shard, with installer update on the shard host. That is what pairs a protocol-5 sidecar with a protocol-5 overlay; the installer refuses to pair a mismatched one by design.

The order matters, and step 2 is the one that starts the clock. The protocol pin lives in the UO module's schema: on the first boot after the module updates, uo_link_config.protocol moves to 5 and the site starts sending X-UOLink-Version: 5. A shard still on 4 answers 409 from that moment on, so shard data stops. Nothing is lost and nothing is corrupted — the site degrades to showing the shard offline, exactly as it does when the sidecar is down — but it stays that way until the shard is updated. If you cannot update the shard in the same window, update the site and leave the module on its current version until you can.

Protocol 5 adds a decay schedule and owner account to house.decay, fee and owner state to vendor.listing, and a new account.login.result. Those three fields are what the shard-driven rules are built on; a shard on 4 could not feed them.

2. Team notification email arrives switched off

Required if your Teams rely on email. Team email used to send automatically. It now runs through the engagement engine like everything else, as four rules — and like every rule on the platform, they are seeded disabled. Nothing mails until an operator switches one on.

Open Admin → Engagement → Rules and enable the Team rules you want. A banner on that screen says the same thing while they are all off, and disappears when one is enabled.

Only email moved. The push tickle and the Discord bridge are unchanged and kept working through the upgrade, so the app and your Discord channel behave exactly as before. Per-member Team preferences and unsubscribe links still apply above the rules.

3. News push stops until you switch it on

Required if you publish news and expect it to notify. Publishing a news post used to send a push tickle directly. That call is now an engagement trigger, seeded — again — as a disabled rule. A deployment that upgrades and does nothing else tickles nobody on the next publish.

Same screen: Admin → Engagement → Rules, enable the news rule.

This is deliberate rather than an oversight. The alternative was to keep the old direct tickle beside the new trigger for one release, and an exception with no owner is one nobody removes.

Behaviour changes that need no action

• An unsubscribe link now turns off one channel, not everything. The old link muted a user outright, which silenced push as well as mail. It now switches off exactly the channel the link was in.
• Email and push are opt-in; the in-app inbox is on. A user who changes nothing receives in-app items and no mail. That matches the Team preference model already in use, and it is why enabling a rule does not by itself produce a mail storm.
• A rule cannot mail more people than its trigger allows. Every trigger declares an audience ceiling, and a rule is checked against it — so a staff-only event cannot be given a public audience, whatever the rule says.
• Bounces now suppress an address. A hard bounce or a rejected recipient stops further mail to that address and is listed under Admin → Engagement → Suppressions, which is also the only screen that can lift one. An address that has stopped receiving mail is the first thing to check there.

If you do nothing

The site upgrades, the in-app inbox works, and no mail is sent — because every rule is off and email needs both a transport (see the SMTP entry below) and a user who opted in. What you lose silently is Team email and news push, both of which were sending before the upgrade and stop at it. If you also leave the UO module on its current version, the shard keeps working on protocol 4 and none of the shard-driven rules exist yet.

Data

Nothing is dropped and no row is deleted. New tables cover rules, segments, templates, the outbox, the send log, cooldowns, suppressions, per-channel preferences and the in-app inbox. team_notification_prefs is kept and still consulted — per-Team granularity did not move.

Nothing in this schema expires on its own. Finished outbox rows, the send log and the suppression list are kept until you remove them; there is no retention sweep. On a busy deployment those tables grow without limit, which is worth knowing before it is worth acting on.

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Email addresses are now unique, and some accounts may lose theirs

Required only if the dashboard says so. Engagement Phase 1b.

What changed

An account's email address is now the destination for account recovery and, in time, for notification mail, so an address may belong to one account only. Until now it could repeat — SSO sign-up wrote whatever address the provider returned, without checking — so a database that has been running with SSO enabled may well hold duplicates.

Users can now also set and change their own address, under Account → Email address, confirming it by opening a link. Before this there was no way for anyone to change their own address at all.

What the upgrade does on first boot

Nothing you need to trigger, and no account is deleted. Where several accounts share an address:

• the earliest-created account keeps it — not the "verified" one, because SSO used to mark an address verified merely for existing, so that flag cannot arbitrate anything;
• every later account has its address cleared (set to nothing) and is listed in a report;
• the dashboard then shows a warning naming how many accounts were affected.

Case is folded — Foo@x.com and foo@x.com are the same mailbox — but accents are not: josé@x.com and jose@x.com are correctly treated as two different addresses.

What you have to do

If the warning appears, open Admin → Users and read the report. It names each affected account and the address it lost. Those users are the reason this warning exists: they can still sign in normally, but they can no longer receive password-reset or notification email until they set a new address themselves, and nothing tells them that. Contact them, and point them at Account → Email address.

Dismissing the warning keeps the report — it is the record of what the upgrade did, and the only place the lost addresses survive.

Verification email

Confirmation links are sent through the same transport as everything else, so if outbound email is not configured, nobody can confirm an address. The screen says so honestly rather than claiming a mail was sent. If you have not configured SMTP yet, see the entry below first.

The verification setting

A new setting, require a confirmed address before sending notification email, is seeded off on an existing deployment and on for a fresh install. The asymmetry is deliberate: switching it on retroactively would silently stop mailing every user who had already opted in, on the day you upgraded. Nothing reads it yet — it takes effect when engagement notifications ship — so there is no hurry to change it.

If you do nothing

The de-duplication has already run; it runs on the first boot whether or not you read this. What you lose by ignoring it is the chance to tell the affected users, who will otherwise discover it the next time they try to reset a password.

Data

Nothing is dropped and no row is deleted. users gains email_norm (a generated lowercase copy of email, which carries the uniqueness index) and email_pending. Two tables are added: email_verifications and email_dedupe_report. Cleared addresses survive in the report.

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Outbound email: the Gmail connect flow is gone; configure SMTP

Required, if this deployment currently sends email. Engagement Phase 1.

What changed

The "Connect Gmail" consent flow has been removed. Email now sends through an ordinary mail transport whose credentials an admin types in — SMTP is the baseline and the only transport shipped.

Removed with it: GET /api/v1/admin/email/connect/start, GET /api/v1/admin/email/connect/callback, and email's reuse of the google authentication provider's client id and secret. That reuse is worth a sentence of its own, because it was a coupling nobody could see: rotating the Google SSO secret silently broke outbound mail, with nothing on either screen relating the two. Single sign-on is otherwise unaffected — the google provider row exists for SSO in its own right and is untouched.

What you must do

On the first boot after the upgrade, email_config.transport backfills to smtp with no credentials. Until you supply some, no mail is sent — and nothing errors, because every sender is written to degrade politely:

• the contact form falls back to a mailto: link,
• an invite returns the accept link for you to send by hand,
• a password reset still answers its usual generic success,
• Team notifications are logged and dropped.

That is the risk this note exists for: email stops and nothing complains. The admin dashboard shows a warning while it is true, and the warning goes away by itself once a credential is saved.

Go to Admin → Settings → Email, choose the posture that fits, then use Send test — which is now the real verification of the whole configuration, not a formality.

Posture	Settings	Notes
A relay — recommended	The relay's host, port 587, Implicit TLS off, your API key as the password	Mailgun, SES, Postmark and equivalents. Reputation, DKIM and bounce handling are the relay's problem. The right answer for anything with volume
Gmail over SMTP — the shortest migration	smtp.gmail.com, port 587, Implicit TLS off, your Google address as the username, and an app password	This is the direct replacement for the removed connect flow. It needs an app password — 2-Step Verification must be on, and your ordinary account password will not work. Google's per-day send caps apply
Your own MTA	Its host, port 25, Implicit TLS off, username and password left blank	For an operator already running mail on the same host

Two fields cause most failures:

• Implicit TLS is on only for port 465. On port 587 leave it off — the connection still upgrades to TLS, via STARTTLS. Port 587 with it on does not error; it hangs.
• Send from is now typed by you rather than read back from Google, so nothing guarantees the server will accept it. It must be an address the account is allowed to send as, or the mail is refused for SPF/DMARC reasons that look like nothing at all. Send test names this specifically when it happens.

If you do nothing

Mail stays off. Nothing breaks and no data is lost — the site, the admin panel, logins, SSO and the shard integration all behave exactly as before. The dashboard warning stays up until you either configure a transport or press Clear credentials, which is how you say "this deployment deliberately sends no mail".

Data

Nothing is dropped. email_config gains transport, credential_enc and reply_to; the old provider and refresh_token_enc columns are kept but no longer read. Your stored Gmail refresh token is not used again and is cleared the first time you press Clear credentials.