News post → town crier + Discord announcement pipeline

Replace the fire-and-forget Discord-only announce on publish with a
retry-safe, two-leg pipeline. When a post transitions into published-news
(false→true publish while in news, or category→news while published), an
announce_jobs row is enqueued with two INDEPENDENT delivery legs:

  • town crier — sidecar POST /towncrier via uoLinkClient (stable id
    `post-<id>` so a retry replaces rather than duplicates)
  • discord    — bot POST /internal/announce via botInternalClient
    (single source of truth for the #news channel stays in the bot)

An in-process poller (utils/announceWorker) sweeps the table every
ANNOUNCE_POLL_MS and dispatches each due leg with its own exponential
backoff (30s→2h, 6 attempts). A leg is retried on transient failures
(503/504/network) and failed fast on data/config errors (400 over-cap,
401/409). Publishing never blocks on the sidecar or Discord — enqueue is
local DB only. Parent `status` is a done/partial/failed rollup of the two
legs; posts.announced_at is stamped once both deliver.

Admin visibility: GET /admin/posts/:id/announce + a per-leg Retry
(POST .../announce/retry) surfaced in the PostEditor for news posts.

Pure decisions (text build/caps, classification, backoff, rollup) live in
announceJobs.logic and are unit-tested (server/test/announceJobs.test.js,
10 tests). The old manual /admin/uo-link/towncrier form is untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0114TpmrNW4wNXsHq5CR72jQ

server/.env.example

@@ -88,3 +88,11 @@ CLIENT_ORIGIN=http://localhost:5173
 # encrypted in the DB (see the bot_config table / SECRET_ENC_KEY above).
 BOT_INTERNAL_URL=http://localhost:4100
 BOT_INTERNAL_KEY=dev-only-change-me-bot-key
+
+# News announcement pipeline (published news post -> in-game town crier + Discord
+# #news). The dispatcher is an in-process poller; these tune it. Links in the
+# announcements use APP_BASE_URL (set above), so set that in production too.
+#   ANNOUNCE_POLL_MS       how often the dispatcher sweeps for due/retry legs
+#   TOWNCRIER_DURATION_SEC how long the in-game town-crier message stays up (<= 86400)
+ANNOUNCE_POLL_MS=15000
+TOWNCRIER_DURATION_SEC=3600