The chat comes to the front page
Nine people put up a receiver today. Most of them never saw a single word anyone has written here, and that was not their fault.
Here is how the site was built. Pages like /feed, /stations, /adsb and /ais render instead of the game, not inside it. They are fast, they work without WebGL, and they are where you land when you come to set up an antenna. They also had no chat, no activity feed and no sign that other people exist. Five of today's nine accounts never pressed Take off at all. For them the community was a thing they had been told about rather than a thing they could see.
So the feed and the chat moved to where people already are. There is a new 💬 button in the header, right next to the bell, and it opens a small panel with two tabs: the live activity feed, and the global chat. You can read both without loading the world. If you are signed in you can type into the chat from there too, and what you write lands on the screen of everyone currently flying in the same instant, because the message goes through the same room the game uses. It is one room, not a second one for people who are not playing.
The two red counts in the header now mean two different things, and only two. The bell counts things that happened to you: an achievement, your station coming online, a new follower. The 💬 counts things somebody said. The feed deliberately has no counter at all. A number that tells you about a thousand unread rows is a number you learn to ignore, and the bell is too useful to train people out of.
Three smaller repairs came with it.
The collapsed chat inside the game used to show the channel name and nothing else. Minimise it once and you would never hear about a message again, because the panel counted itself as "read" whether it was open or a thin strip. It now carries the count, and clicking the strip when the count is up takes you straight to the chat rather than the feed.
The global room is now genuinely global. Until today a line written from Globe was invisible from Terra, which also meant two pilots flying side by side could be invisible to each other if their saved worlds differed. City channels are still tied to their world, because a city only exists in one.
And the watermark that decides what counts as unread survives a page reload on the site. Every link in the header is an ordinary link, so moving between pages reloads everything, and a counter that forgot itself each time would have announced the whole backlog on every click.
None of this makes a quiet room loud. But a room nobody can find is quiet for a reason that has nothing to do with the people in it.