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/src/server.js

@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ const uoLinkSocket = require('./utils/uoLinkSocket')
 const uoLinkClient = require('./utils/uoLinkClient')
 const uoLinkConfig = require('./model/uoLinkConfig/uoLinkConfig.model')
 const shardBroadcast = require('./utils/shardBroadcast')
+const announceWorker = require('./utils/announceWorker')
 const { ensureSchema, close } = require('./utils/db')
 const { seedDefaults, createInitialAdminFromEnv } = require('../db/seed')
 const settings = require('./model/settings/settings.model')
@@ -92,6 +93,11 @@ async function start() {
     log.warn('uo-link socket failed to start (continuing)', { error: err.message })
   }
 
+  // Start the news-announcement dispatcher: a light in-process poller that pushes
+  // published news posts to the in-game town crier + Discord with independent
+  // retry per leg. No-op until a news post is actually published.
+  announceWorker.start()
+
   setupShutdown(server, internalServer)
 }
 
@@ -129,6 +135,7 @@ function setupShutdown(server, internalServer) {
     closing = true
     log.warn(`${signal} received — shutting down gracefully`)
     botScore.stopSweeper() // stop the bot-store cleanup interval
+    announceWorker.stop() // stop the news-announcement dispatcher poller
     uoLinkSocket.stop() // close the uo-link WS ingest client
     shardBroadcast.closeAll() // end any open shard live-feed SSE streams
     server.close(() => log.info('http server closed'))