Changelog

1.8.1 · October 17, 2026 · current

Console polish

UI enhancements for the SysOp console. No new features.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched.

1.8.0 · October 15, 2026

File areas

The first of the three big ones. Callers upload and download from the terminal, and you can stock a folder by FTP and scan it in. Anyone who runs message areas already knows how this works: categories, areas, access strings, a current area, and menu items that point at one area or ask the caller to pick. While a door runs, a slim bar above the terminal now says where the caller is. And the DOS drive learned how to make a file shorter.

File areas

• Areas and categories. File areas sit on categories of their own. Each area has a Read ACS, which gates the area and its downloads, and a Write ACS for uploads. That one is enforced. It is the first Write ACS the board honors, because uploads take disk. An area can be listed or hidden, and by default its uploads wait for your approval; it can also list them at once or take none at all. An area marked free counts for nothing when an economy is on, and any area can keep its files in a folder of your own outside the web root. A new board starts with a Files shelf holding one General area.
• The caller's road. A FILES menu (list, new files, search, upload, change area), and File Areas on MAIN under F, or the first free digit when F is taken. A board that wants no file areas removes the key. The list shows each file's name, size, date, downloads and uploader, with the first line of its description beneath. Enter opens the whole description, paged when it runs long. D downloads and U uploads. N shows what is new since the caller's last call, and a first call sees nothing as new. S searches names and descriptions across every area the caller may read, with * and ? as wildcards. O flips between newest first and by name; A changes area. A menu item can aim at one file area the way a message item aims at one message area, and a section menu keeps its own file area beside its message area, under the one scope.
• Real names. Files keep their names: printable ASCII up to 120 characters, accents transliterated, characters a path or a web server cannot carry removed, and names a web server might run refused. A name is unique within its area. Every file is a real file on disk under data/files/ and the area's tag, so you can stock an area by FTP and scan it from the console.
• Downloads. D hands the browser a short-lived link and the file arrives under its listed name. A browser that resumes a broken fetch can do so. The download counts when the bytes start to move.
• Uploads. U opens the browser's file chooser, or drop a file anywhere on the screen. The board checks the name and the size before a byte crosses. Then the bytes cross in pieces small enough for a shared host's post limit, and when the file is whole the description editor opens, filled in from FILE_ID.DIZ if the archive carries one. Uploads wait for you by default, set per area. A held file shows only to its uploader, marked. The largest upload is a setting: 10 MB to start.
• The economies, switched off. File points are in, earned when an upload is listed and spent when a file comes down. So is an upload-to-download ratio with a grace of free downloads, and a daily download limit. Every one of them ships off. With the ratio or points on, the list header shows where the caller stands, and a refused download always says why. The SysOp is never refused.
• New codes, and a help menu. %FA and %FD name the current file area and describe it. %FC counts its files and %FN the ones new to the caller. %FT counts every file on the board and %FU the caller's uploads. %FP is the caller's points, blank while points are off. The caller's help is a menu now, with a page each for colors, the board, message areas, file areas and the keys. A HELP menu item can open any one page directly.

The console

• A File Areas page. Categories and areas work like the message areas editor: tag, name, category, access strings, upload mode, free, folder and art. Each area has a Files tab. Edit a description there, rename, move, delete, approve, or refuse; a refusal sends a letter to the uploader's mailbox with a reason you can edit over the canned one. A Held filter gathers every waiting upload, and the rail shows the count. Upload from the console. Scan the folder lists whatever FTP dropped in, two hundred files a press, with descriptions from a FILES.BBS or a FILE_ID.DIZ.
• Menus. The designer offers the seven file modules, a file area target for an item, a default file area per menu, and a page letter for HELP items.
• Settings. A File areas card: the largest upload, the minimum description, whether to read FILE_ID.DIZ, whether to show the uploader, the daily download limit, how long a download link lives, the ratio and its grace, and file points with their rates.
• Users. A caller's card shows their uploads and downloads. While points are on it shows the balance too, and you can set it.
• Backups can carry the files. The Backup tab has an Include file areas checkbox. It shows what the backup would weigh either way and warns past half a gigabyte, and a restore puts the files back.
• A first-time notice. On an upgraded board the Dashboard says once which key File Areas took on MAIN. If no key was free, it says the item is waiting, hidden, for you to give it one.

A bar above the terminal while a door runs

• The door bar. While a door runs, a slim strip above the terminal shows the board, the door's title, the node, the minutes left and how many callers are in the door. The terminal moves down to make room. Then the buttons. Keys opens a short card on what the keys do and how to get out. Full screen is what it says. Leave door sends three Ctrl+] into a DOS door the old way, after a word about the game's own quit. A native door gets the bar too, with its title.
• The door's status line, for callers. DOS doors keep a status line for the SysOp on their own screen, the one the modem never carried, and it is where most games print the turns left. Each DOS door now has a switch on its page, Show the door's status line to callers, that puts those bottom rows in the bar. Off until you turn it on.

DOS doors

• Files get shorter now. A DOS program cuts a file at its new end with a write of zero bytes; Turbo Pascal's Truncate and C's chsize both work that way. The network drive dropped that write, so a file rewritten shorter kept its old tail. A small resident program on the boot floppy now sends the cut, and the board honors it. Found on the ATA side, on The Major BBS, whose option compiler rewrote a file two bytes shorter.
• F-keys stay out of the browser. F5 in a DOS door reloaded the page and ended the seat. While a DOS door runs, function keys no longer reach the browser.

Fixes

• A letter is not a post. Sending private mail counted as a post. It showed in the Dashboard's posts today and in the call log's "Posted N msgs", and it raised the caller's post count on the Users page and the Stats screen. Letters count nowhere now. Counts already on record stay as they are.

For the record

• The schema moves to v17. It adds the tables file areas need, a caller's previous login, a default file area per menu, and the status line switch for each DOS door. A board upgrades itself on the first visit, as ever.
• A board with its own strings.ini hears once that the strings grew: [fareas] and [files] are new sections, and [help] is reworked into a menu with its pages.
• The 1.7.9 Dashboard notice about theme strings showed the 1.7.0 list under its own title, and its own entry was missing. The entry is there now. If your board dismissed that card, look at list > columns and list > navkeys in your strings.ini.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. The first visit climbs the schema to v17 and stocks a Files shelf with a General area and a FILES menu. File Areas lands on MAIN under F, or the first free digit, and the Dashboard tells you once which key it took. The file economies stay off until you switch them on, and so does every door's status line. The door bar needs nothing from you.

The whole of it is in the manual's new file areas chapter.

1.7.9 · September 25, 2026

A way back

The last release before the big ones. The next three majors bring file areas, multi-room chat and echomail, and they lean on what this one adds: a way to keep the database healthy and a way to put the whole board back if an upgrade goes wrong. The message list learns to fold threads, DOS door games and ANSI art draw every CP437 picture, and the console gets a light desk.

Backup and restore

• The whole board in one zip. Database, under The machine, has a Backup tab. A backup holds data/ (art, themes, door saves, config) and the database, whichever engine the board runs on: on SQLite a consistent snapshot rather than a copy of the live file, on MySQL a dump the board writes itself, one statement a line, so nothing on the host is needed. A manifest inside vouches for every entry with a hash.
• Where it goes. A server path you name, which the board refuses if it lies inside the web root or inside the board itself, because a zip holding the database and the credentials under public_html is a breach waiting to happen. Or data/backups, which the web cannot read, for a download through the console. The newest few are kept and older ones removed; you set how many.
• On a schedule. The scheduled backup sits beside the maintenance tools with the same every-N-days setting and writes to the server path.
• Restore, carefully. From an upload or from a backup on the server. The board looks at the manifest first and refuses a backup made on the other engine, by a newer ATDT, or changed since it was made. Then, in order: the board goes offline, a safety copy of the board as it is now is made into data/backups, the files and every table are replaced, the schema is brought up to this release from the backup's version, every session ends, and the board is left offline for you to look at before switching it back on. Your config.php is never overwritten: this host's address and database credentials stay, and the backup's copy is left beside it to compare. A typed RESTORE confirms it.

A database toolkit

• Tools, with a schedule. The Database page lists what the board can do for itself, each with Run now and an every-N-days setting that the nightly housekeeping honors. On SQLite: quick and full integrity checks, optimize, analyze, a write-ahead log checkpoint and vacuum. On MySQL: check, analyze and optimize tables. On both: purge deleted messages (until now a deleted message stayed in the table, invisible), purge deleted callers (they stayed in the list after deletion; now they go, with their read pointers, and their messages stay under their name), prune the call log to a keep window set under Settings, sweep orphaned rows, and a schema doctor that compares the live tables to what this release expects and adds anything missing.
• A status card above them: engine and version, size, what a vacuum or optimize would give back, the file and its journal on SQLite, the largest table on MySQL.
• Heavy tools wait for a real cron tick. Vacuum, a full integrity check, optimizing tables and the scheduled backup can run for a minute on a big board, so they run on demand or from cron.php called by cron or wget, never from the pseudo-cron that rides a caller's request under the host's time limit. A heavy tool that had to wait says so on the page, and the Database entry in the rail shows a count when something failed or is waiting.

The message list

• Threads fold. Minus folds the replies under the highlighted message (from a reply, the thread it belongs to, and the bar climbs to the top of it), plus opens them, star folds or opens every thread at once, and T moves the bar to the message this one answers. A folded row ends with how much it hides and how much of that is new, [+12, 3 new], in yellow when any of it is. Folding is for the call; a fresh call opens everything.
• The tree says which messages have replies. A message with replies wears a triangle: down when the replies are on show, right when they are folded away. A root wears it in the gutter before the subject, a reply wears it on its branch. A message with no replies draws a plain line. Past the fourth level the tree steps in one column a level, a staircase, until it reaches the edge of the subject column, so a chain of twelve replies reads as a chain.
• Areas can open folded. Settings, Look and feel, "Message list on arrival": Open, every reply on show; or Folded, one row a thread with its tail saying how many replies wait and how many are new, the bar landing on the thread that hides the oldest unread. Callers fold and open with the same keys either way, and the choice lasts the call. Open is the default.
• The From column takes a whole handle. From is 20 characters wide now, the longest a handle can be, so nobody is clipped; the message number takes five digits, which a big import reaches; the subject gives up a little room for both. The header sits over the columns.
• A big area is light on its feet. The list used to fetch every subject in the area on every keystroke; a 30,000-message area cost a quarter of a second and forty megabytes per move. Now it fetches how the threads nest, plus the text for the rows on screen.

DOS doors and ANSI art

• The player shows up in LORD II. DOS door games draw pictures with the CP437 bytes below 0x20: LORD II: New World's player is 0x02, a smiley, and its forest is 0x06, a spade. The board passed those bytes to the terminal as control codes, which dropped them, so a SysOp reported a map with no player on it. Trees, smileys, arrows, notes and card suits now draw as the pictures a DOS screen shows, and the true controls (bell, backspace, tab, line feed, form feed, carriage return, escape) still act. Rows that held a dropped picture also slid left; they line up again.
• Art draws them too. A heart, a smiley or a triangle in a SysOp's .ANS screen went missing the same way; they draw now, in menus, bulletins, the gallery and native doors' screens alike.
• The ANSI editor can use them. The glyph picker offers the smileys, suits and arrows, and a saved file keeps them.
• A player's chat can no longer end other callers' doors. The board learns that a DOS door ended from a word the door's batch file sends; a player could type that word into a multinode game's chat and every other caller's door ended with it. Each session's word now carries a code of its own that nobody inside a game can see.
• A LORD II package. A ready-made LORD II: New World for the DOS doors folder is available as its own download; dosdoors/LORD2.md covers installing it.

The console

• A light desk. Settings, under This console, has a theme choice: Dark, the console as shipped; Light, a light work surface under the same dark instrument rail; or Follow the browser, which takes the browser's own preference and changes with it. The login page wears it too. Dark stays the default.
• A keep window for the call log under Settings, Advanced, read by the prune tool: a year unless changed, 0 to keep it forever.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. The first visit adds the duties table (schema v15). Then open Database under The machine, set a backup path outside your web root, and take the first backup. Nothing is scheduled until you schedule it, and nothing is folded until a caller folds it.

A board with its own strings.ini hears once that the message list strings changed: list > columns moved the From column, and list > commands split into commands and the new navkeys row.

1.7.8 · September 21, 2026

The board knows when it is behind

ATDT arrives as a zip you upload by hand, which has always meant a board had no way to learn that a newer release exists. From 1.7.8 the console's version lamp answers that question, from one small file on the ATDT website, read once a day and carrying nothing about your board. A 14400 bps line speed, a console that can sit in the middle of a wide window, and two reports from the field ride along.

The console tells you when a new release is out

• The version lamp does something now. The fourth lamp in the console rail has always been a readout. Once a day the board reads one small text file from the ATDT website and remembers what the current release is, so the lamp can say where this board stands: green when it is the current release, amber when a newer one is out, red when a whole major version has gone by, and the grey it has always been when the check has not run, could not run, or is switched off. When there is something to fetch, the Dashboard carries a line naming the new version with a download link.
• It does not delay your console. The nightly housekeeping does the checking, or the pseudo-cron that rides the tail of a caller's request. The console only reads what was stored, and nothing reaches out on a page load. On a host that can finish a response before running the tail work, which is most of them, nobody waits on it at all; on one that cannot, the single caller request a day that carries the check waits on a three-second leash at most. A board whose host has no outbound network stays grey, says so once in the log, and carries on.
• It carries nothing about your board. The request is a plain ask for a file: no board name, no address, no version, nothing in the query string. The website learns that a board asked, which its own log would have recorded anyway.
• Settings has the switch, under Release check, with the time of the last look, what it found, and a Check now button. Turn it off and the board never reaches out.

Two more things the console can do

• A 14400 bps line speed. The ladder a caller cycles with S under Your Settings, and the board speed you set under Look & feel, now ends at 14400 before the throttle switches off. It is the fastest speed that still types itself out; above it a screen arrives whole. An unthrottled line answers CONNECT 28800 now, one notch past the top of the ladder, so it no longer claims the same number as a throttled one.
• The console can sit in the middle of the window. On a very wide screen a maximized browser left the whole console against the left edge. Settings, under This console, has a switch that centers it, rail and all, once the window is wider than the console needs. It is off by default and changes nothing about the pages themselves, only where the whole machine sits on the desk.

Two from the field

• Changing message area leaves the cursor at the prompt. Picking a new board printed the line naming it on the bottom row after the menu had already drawn its prompt, and the cursor, which follows the last thing printed, sat on the notice instead of where you type. The notice puts the cursor back where it found it now.
• The highlighted row in a message list keeps its columns. The bar measured the subject in bytes rather than columns, so on a reply, whose subject carries the tree glyphs of the thread, the From and Date columns slid left; the bar also stopped a column short of the right edge. It is painted as one run of 80 columns now, in the same places as every other row.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. No settings change and no schema step. The first nightly tick after the upgrade looks up the current release and the version lamp takes its color; until then it stays grey, as it was.

The release check is on by default. It switches off in Settings under Release check, and a board that never checks behaves exactly as 1.7.7 did. The centered console is off by default. A board speed set to something off the ladder now reads as 9600, which only matters to a board whose settings were edited by hand.

1.7.7 · September 17, 2026

The console wears the board's colors

1.7.7 is a look, not a feature. The SysOp console, the login page and the installer now wear the board's own palette: a dark work surface with an instrument rail down the left, four lamps for the board's live state, and four colors that each mean one thing everywhere. Every page keeps its forms, fields, confirmations and copy. Two field items ride along, and so does a pair of fixes for hand-drawn connect screens: the login line now follows the art instead of painting over it, and an MCI code can be told to stamp in place.

A dark console with an instrument rail

Every console page now sits on the board's own palette: a near-black work surface, panels one step lighter, and a rail down the left carrying the board's name, four lamps and the pages in five groups.

The lamps are the board's live state at a glance: nodes on the wire against the limit, the age of the last cron tick (amber once the pseudo-cron has had to step in, red past twenty minutes or when cron never ran, the same verdict the Dashboard's cron card gives and now shares), the carrier switch, and the version. The groups are The board (Dashboard, Users, Logs), What callers read (Message Areas, Community, Menus), How it looks (Themes, ANSI Editor, Gallery), Doors (Native Doors, and DOS Doors when the switch is on) and The machine (Settings, Import). Counts sit beside the pages that have them; pending applicants show in amber on Users, and a caller's page rings on Dashboard with a pulsing amber dot. The rail wears an amber edge while the board is offline.

Four lights, one meaning each

Cyan is the wire: links, and the one primary button on a form. Green is live: online, enabled, healthy. Amber is hold: pending, stale, waiting. Red is cut: destructive actions, failures, refusals.

Row actions in every table are text links in those colors instead of a row of small buttons, and the delete glyph is now the word the confirmation uses, delete or remove. Reorder arrows stay quiet until the pointer reaches them. The confirmations behind every destructive action are unchanged, and arrow glyphs no longer ride on link and button text.

Machine data in the machine's face

Node numbers, levels, counts, timestamps, tags, slugs and access strings are set in the monospace face; prose is set in Archivo, which ships with the board, so no outside font service is called. Fields are wells cut into the panel, and the focused one wears an amber ring.

The login page and the installer wear the same style. Settings is one column again, and the Native Doors and DOS Doors lists span the page above their drawers, so a door's row has room.

Connect screens, and MCI codes inside art

• The login line follows the art. A theme's connect screen used to have the board's login line painted across rows 20 to 24 whatever the art did, so a screen taller than nineteen rows lost its last rows under it. The line now sits two blank rows under wherever the art ends: a 21-row screen keeps every row and the prompt lands at the bottom. Art up to seventeen rows, and the board's own generated banner, sit exactly where they always did.
• A bare code still fills in and pushes the row along. That is unchanged, and it is what a sentence wants: draw %LC before you and the last caller's name pushes the rest of the line over.
• Put an exclamation mark in front of a code and the value stamps in place. The value is laid into the four columns the mark and the code took up in the drawing: it overwrites what follows when it is longer and pads when it is shorter, so the row is painted exactly as wide as it was drawn and a frame keeps its right-hand border. Mark the codes inside boxes and tables; leave the ones in sentences bare. The caller's code guide, the HELP action, carries the rule.
• A row is cut at column 80 now, never wrapped. A value that would run off the right edge used to wrap onto the next line and push the whole picture down a row. Whichever way a code fills in, the rows under it stay where they were drawn.

Two small things from the field

• The DOS doors setting on the Settings page now reads "Real DOS door games running in the caller's browser", with the old release number gone from the front of the hint.
• The door's line is folded away. On a DOS door's Maintenance page the door's line pane, the serial side that shows what a caller would see, is closed by default under a one-click heading, since the machine's own screen is where nearly all maintenance happens. Open it when a door goes quiet; the help text on the page points there.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. No settings change and no schema step. The console picks up the new look on the next page load, since the stylesheet link carries the version, so no cache clearing is needed. Native door admin panels render inside the new console unchanged. On the caller's side only the screens above moved: a theme's connect art, MCI codes inside art, and the code guide's own page.

1.7.6 · September 13, 2026

The maintenance shows itself

1.7.6 is about the first caller of the day. A DOS door's daily maintenance runs on that caller's machine, ahead of the game, and until now it ran in the dark. That caller now sees the run, and can answer it. The message area list gets the look the board deserved. And the native door games get their blinking cursor back, with matching releases of every door.

The first caller of the day watches the maintenance run

The programs that do a door's daily work are console programs: Usurper's /HMAINT writes to the machine's own screen and never to the modem, and TradeWars' EXTERN is the same. So the caller who drew the duty watched two gray lines for as long as the sweep took, half an hour on a populated Usurper world, with no way to see a "[Press a key]" waiting behind them, let alone answer it.

The caller's terminal now mirrors the machine's screen, in its own colors, a few times a second, from the boot until the maintenance program finishes. For that stretch the caller's keys go to the machine's keyboard, so a stray prompt is answered instead of stalling the run. When the maintenance ends the screen clears and the game starts exactly as it always did. This works for any door's maintenance program and needs no change to the door or its manifest; the console's Maintenance page, which always showed the screen, is unchanged.

One sweep at a time. The board hands the duty to one caller and waits for that caller's "done" report before handing it out again. That wait was ten minutes, and Usurper's sweep takes half an hour, so a second caller entering alone after ten minutes was handed the same sweep while the first was still running it. The wait is an hour now, longer than any real run, and it is only the backstop: a caller who leaves the door mid-sweep, or whose browser dies, frees the duty the moment their seat is gone.

The message area list

• Descriptions under the names, in color. Each board's description now sits on its own line right under the board's name, in cyan, instead of on a gray information row under the prompt. A board without a description takes one line, as before, so a list that never filled them in looks as it did.
• A lightbar and colored columns. The highlighted board is a white-on-blue bar with its number in yellow. On the other rows the numbers are cyan, the tags green, the names bright while the board holds unread messages, the message counts cyan, and the unread count yellow when there is one. The scrolling window keeps a board and its description together: arrows, PgUp and PgDn and the "more above" and "more below" rails all count in whole boards, and the window grew from thirteen rows to fifteen to make room.

Native door games: the cursor is back

The blinking cursor and the single-key echo are on inside native door games, the way the board's own screens have had them since 1.7.4; between then and now every door had both off. The cursor sits where the door's output ended, so a door that ends its frame at its prompt gets it for free. A door that paints its own prompt marker and repaints only the cells it must turns both off for the whole door with one line in its manifest, "cursor": false, or at a single prompt with hotkey(false). The Door API has the details.

The door games have releases to match. Isle of Morrow 1.6.1 turns the cursor off, since its map would keep every echoed key. Star Merchant II 1.1.1 parks it at the prompt instead of under the status line. Lantern Road 1.0.1 gives every hint a trailing space so the cursor sits a cell clear of it. Usurper, Suzerain and Sweet Trade carry small touches of their own; HILO and the built-in Star Merchant needed nothing.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. No settings change and no schema step. The first caller into a DOS door with a maintenance line after board midnight sees the sweep run; nothing else about the day's routine moves.

1.7.5 · September 7, 2026

The two lines become one

Development had drifted onto two branches that never met. One carried 1.7.1 through 1.7.3, the other carried 1.7.4, and each package was built from one line or the other. The upshot: 1.7.4 shipped without some of what came before it, and a board upgrading from 1.7.3 to 1.7.4 lost the logon tour on the way. That is on me.

1.7.5 merges the two lines. Everything from 1.7.1 through 1.7.4 is in this package, and the build now refuses to produce a release from a branch that is missing one. Whichever version you are on, this is the one to take.

If you are coming from 1.7.4

You get everything 1.7.1 through 1.7.3 added:

• The logon tour. Arrange the cards between the password and the main menu from Settings, or silence them entirely. An arrangement you saved on 1.7.3 comes back on its own; 1.7.4 never touched the setting.
• Daily maintenance for DOS doors. A maintenance line in a door's dosdoor.json, run by the first solo caller after board midnight or from the console button. Subdirectories warmed before entry, the door's own line shown on the maintenance page, and diagnostics screens that stay up after every exit.
• The 1.7.1 door fixes. Doors no longer die on entry once the browser has warmed up, and a door that dies no longer floods the SysOp log or scribbles on the menu.
• The 1.7.3 engine fixes. A hangup is heard the moment a door drops DTR; a big file's cold load no longer floods the wire on a slow host; the boot floppy retries its network attach; door manifests take path globs; the user list's pager prompt gets its blank line.
• The FOSSIL tells time. Its timer function answered with the wrong registers, so a program driving its clock off it could spin forever. It answers properly now, and the boot floppy carries the rebuilt driver.
• Record locking and prefetch work that never had a changelog entry of its own: closing a file releases its record locks, big reads answer early, locks ride the write queue, solo doors lock locally, and door entry waits for the longest transfer rather than the sum of them.

If you are coming from 1.7.3

You get everything in 1.7.4: MySQL boards get their doors back, the cursor at every prompt with single-key echo and no caret fringe, delete-line honored instead of swallowed as ANSI music, the "jit": "off" manifest switch for doors that park in a Turbo Pascal delay loop, and Usurper's care sheet.

Only one thing overlapped between the branches: both fixed the missing prompt cursor, and 1.7.4's version is the one that ships.

Four fixes found along the way

• The first solo caller's maintenance run now stamps the day. From 1.7.2 to 1.7.4 the runner's report that the daily command had finished never reached the board, so the day stayed unstamped and the next solo caller ran the maintenance all over again. The console button was unaffected.
• The "board did not answer" notice paints at once at the FAST baud setting. It used to land in the screen buffer without a repaint and stay invisible until the next screen.
• A shelled program no longer kills its parent's open files. DOS hands a child program a copy of the parent's handle table and closes every entry when the child exits, and with the board drive each of those closes retired an id the parent still held. A door that keeps a file open across a shell, its overlay above all, died on the very next read. Closed ids now retire into a small map instead of dying, so a read, write or seek on one still resolves; locks are released at close exactly as before.
• Star Merchant no longer logs a sector visit twice on MySQL. A same-second re-mark of a sector with identical data read as "no such row" on MySQL, and a second visit row went in. The door looks before it writes now.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. A board coming from 1.7.4 receives the 1.7.2 database step on its first page hit, two small columns on the DOS door table, additive and safe to re-run. A board coming from 1.7.3 has that step already. Browsers pick up the refreshed client and boot floppy on their own through the version stamp.

1.7.4 · September 2, 2026

MySQL boards get their doors back

A board running on MySQL or MariaDB crashed every door game on its second visit: Isle of Morrow died coming back through the gate, HILO lasted about three rounds, and the log filled with "Duplicate entry ... for key door_kv.PRIMARY". The report that cracked it came from the field with the diagnosis attached, and the diagnosis was right.

MySQL reports how many rows an UPDATE changed; SQLite reports how many it matched. When a door wrote a value the row already held, MySQL answered zero, ATDT read zero as "no such row", and the repair INSERT collided with the row that was there all along. SQLite boards never saw it, because SQLite never says zero for a row it found.

• One statement now, on both engines. Every key-value write is a native upsert: INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE on MySQL and MariaDB, INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO UPDATE on SQLite. There is no second guess to get wrong, and no race between two statements.
• Five writers converted. The door key-value store (the crash itself), door score awards (the same crash when an award added zero), board settings (which had been quietly throwing and catching a key violation on every same-value write on MySQL), menu-scope memory, and push subscriptions, which now provably keep their first-subscribed date through a refresh.
• No data was harmed. The crash always fired before a wrong write could land. Upload the release and the same board, on the same database, simply works; nothing needs to be cleaned up or re-entered.
• Proven on a live server. The MySQL test suite now replays the reported failure verbatim against a real server, alongside the same test on SQLite, so the two engines cannot drift apart on this again.

The door engine

• A delete-line no longer silences a door. The ANSI code a door sends to delete a screen line is byte-identical to the start of "ANSI music", and the door stream treated it as music: it swallowed everything after the first delete-line while waiting for a music terminator that never came. A door that used delete-line went quiet mid-screen, and quitting it could leave the seat hanging because the goodbye handshake was swallowed too. The stream now passes the code through, and the terminal honors delete-line and insert-line properly, scrolling the region the way a real ANSI terminal did.
• A switch for doors that stall on a fast machine. The emulator's code compiler mis-runs one rare pair of CPU instructions, and a Turbo Pascal door built with the common "Runtime error 200" patch can park in its own delay loop forever: the door starts, then sits silent, worse the faster the caller's computer, and not on every boot. A new optional line in a door's manifest, "jit": "off", runs that door on the emulator's slower, exact interpreter instead. No shipped door needs it yet; the switch waits for the first one that does.
• Usurper gets its care sheet. Usurper reads its 2 MB overlay file over the board drive constantly unless started with its /X switch, and its daily maintenance has its own list of traps: the wrong switch never exits, a misplaced USUTEXT.DAT stops an unattended run at "[Press a key]", and a deleted DATE.DAT punishes the next caller with a half-hour wait. All of it is measured and written down in USURPER.md in the doors folder, next to the engine's README.

The smaller items

• The caret keeps its colors to itself. The blinking cursor wore a tiny blue dot on its left and a red one on its right. The terminal canvas was inviting the browser's LCD subpixel smoothing, which fringes every glyph edge in red and blue; the lone blinking underscore was where the eye finally caught it. The canvas now uses neutral smoothing: the dots are gone and the cursor is exactly as it was.
• Single-key commands echo. Press a hotkey and the character you typed now prints at the cursor for the beat it takes the board to answer, the way a real terminal felt. The next screen paints over it, and a guard at the last column keeps a stray echo from ever scrolling the screen.

Upgrading

Upload the release over your install, keeping your data/ folder. No schema change: the database ladder stays on its 1.7.0 rungs, no migration runs, and no settings change.

1.7.3 · August 28, 2026

A cursor at every prompt

A release about manners at the prompt and honesty on the wire. The tour a caller walks after the password is now yours to arrange, or silence, from the console; every prompt on the board finally has the blinking cursor a real terminal always kept there; and under the DOS door machinery, a season of running a full DOS board on this engine paid off five debts, from hangups that took twenty seconds to be noticed to a transfer flood that could crash a game on slow hosting. Overlay the files and you are done: no database changes this time at all.

Arrange the logon tour, or silence it

The cards between the password and the main menu, the welcome screen, unread bulletins, auto-message, rumor and last 10 callers, have always run in one fixed order. Settings grew The logon tour: give each stop a position or turn it off, and the board walks your arrangement. Turn everything off and a caller lands straight at the main menu, the way a minimalist board likes its mornings.

Stops with nothing to say still skip themselves, exactly as before. Two courtesies keep their seats whatever you arrange: the one-time email ask when an account has no address on file, and the "you have mail" check when letters are waiting. A board that never touches the setting runs the classic order, unchanged.

A cursor at every prompt

A caller filed it plainly: "the cursor doesn't blink at the prompt as it does on the main menu." The truth was starker. Outside a typed-input field the prompts had no cursor at all, and a main menu only showed one where the board's own art happened to paint a blinking cell. The terminal now keeps a classic blinking underscore at the resting position of every hotkey prompt: menus, pause lines, pagers, the whole logon tour.

It is drawn over the screen, never written into it, so art under the cursor survives untouched; typed fields keep the caret they already had, and a dead line shows nothing, as it should. Same behavior in every browser, Edge included.

The user list breathes

On a full page of the user list, the next-page prompt sat flush against the last caller listed. It now sits a blank line below, like the board's other pagers.

For the DOS doors: a hangup is heard the moment it happens

A DOS program that drops DTR, a door hanging up on its caller or a full board ending a call, used to go unnoticed: the line idled until the batch file behind the game got around to its exit marker, which can be a long silence. The engine now watches the modem-control line itself. The drop ends the call on the spot, with carrier-off mirrored back into the machine first, so the program sees the NO CARRIER it expects while it saves on its way out. The shipped test door grew a D command that drops DTR and proves the road end to end.

Big files stop flirting with death on slow hosts

While a big file was still transferring, every read that landed on it bought its own duplicate wire read as insurance: correct bytes, fatal arithmetic. A program loading its overlay file issues hundreds of small sequential reads, and each one queued a wasted duplicate on the single request lane until the transfer itself was starving behind them; past DOS's half-second patience, the game crashed. Reads near the transfer's frontier now simply ride it, and only a genuine seek far into untransferred territory buys a targeted read, one at a time. Nothing got slower; the flood is gone.

Smaller door-engine notes

• The boot floppy retries its network attach. EtherDFS used to get exactly one shot at finding the board's drive; a briefly throttled host at that instant meant a dead boot. Three tries now, each re-checking the drive first.
• Door manifests take path globs. The static and session lists still speak plain DOS masks, and now also forward-slash paths: DATA/SAVE*.* pins one directory, ** crosses directories. Session trees work too, so directories a game creates inside one live in the caller's tab and per-node scratch never touches the wire.
• Deaf input can be caught in the act. For the rare report of a session that stops hearing keys, the engine keeps a receive witness (bytes handed to the machine, bytes it spoke back, and the machine's undrained input queue) and with diagnostics on, a byte sitting unread is called out in the browser console.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched and there are no database changes in this release. The refreshed boot floppy and client ride the version stamp, so browsers pick them up on their own. Existing door manifests keep working unchanged; the new path globs are purely additive.

1.7.2 · August 25, 2026

Daily maintenance for DOS doors

1.7.2 brings daily maintenance to DOS doors and repairs the way a door's first entry of the day treated data kept in subdirectories. Upgrading from 1.7.0 or 1.7.1 is a plain overlay upload.

New: daily maintenance for DOS doors

Some doors expect a maintenance program to run once a day. TradeWars 2002's EXTERN is not optional; Usurper's daily sweep matters too. A door's dosdoor.json may now name it:

The board cannot run DOS itself, so the clock arms the duty and a machine runs it, the way 1993 did it: the first caller entering the door alone after board midnight runs the command on the way in, sees it happen, and the game starts when it ends. The board stamps the day the moment the run completes, so exactly one entry a day pays the toll, and a run abandoned by a closed tab is retried by the next solo entry.

• The console can run it any time. The maintenance page for a door that names the command grows a Run the daily maintenance button: same command, on that screen, and it stamps the day so callers skip it. The page also shows when maintenance last completed.
• The log watches the calendar. If a door goes more than a day without a completed run because nobody entered alone, the nightly tick puts one line in the SysOp log saying so and naming both remedies.
• Nothing changes without the field. Doors whose manifest has no maintenance line behave exactly as before, end to end.

The TradeWars 2002 package on this site now ships the field, so EXTERN stops being a SysOp chore.

Bug fixes

• Doors that keep their data in a subdirectory no longer die or half-run their first-of-day maintenance. The pre-entry transfer used to warm only the door's root folder, so a game sweeping its DATA directory (Usurper, first login of the day) read every file cold over the wire, and one slow-host burst mid-sweep tore a file or crashed the door at the caller's feet. Worse, a burst landing on the directory listing itself handed DOS "no files": the sweep finished in a blink having swept nothing, and the game stamped the day as maintained. The transfer now warms one level of subdirectories, and the engine remembers each directory's last full listing, answering repeat listings locally while nothing has changed and serving the last known view if the wire ever eats a listing whole.
• The console maintenance page shows the door's line. A door game run by hand there talks on the serial line, exactly as it does for a caller, and the page used to show only the machine's own DOS screen: the game looked like it was doing nothing. The page now has two screens side by side, the machine's own and the door's line (a real terminal that also answers the door's ANSI probes), and keys go to whichever screen was clicked last. Config tools keep working exactly as before.
• With diagnostics on, the door's DOS screen now stays up after every exit, not only after error exits, for half a minute or until clicked. A door that dies young after one keypress used to read as a short normal visit, and the one screen naming the error vanished with the teardown.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; the data/ folder is untouched. The first page hit adds two small columns to the DOS door table (the maintenance day and its lease); the step is additive and safe to re-run. To give an installed door a daily command, add the maintenance line to its dosdoor.json and press Scan on the DOS Doors page.

1.7.1 · August 24, 2026

A repair release for the DOS doors

1.7.1 fixes the DOS door system that shipped in 1.7.0. If your board runs 1.7.0, upgrade: the bug it fixes hits every caller whose browser has already visited a door once.

Bug fixes

• DOS doors no longer die on entry once the browser has warmed up. 1.7.0 started the DOS machine the moment the emulator was ready. On a first visit that was fine, but 1.7.0 also taught the browser to cache the emulator, so on the next entry the machine was ready in a blink: FreeDOS reached the game while the game files were still transferring, the two fought over the line, and on real shared hosting the game's first reads timed out. The caller was dumped back at the menu seconds after entering, TradeWars 2002 and LORD both, on every browser, while an incognito window (nothing cached, machine loads slowly, transfer wins) kept working and made the whole thing look haunted. The machine now waits for the transfer to finish before it boots, the ordering that was proven in the field before the release. Entries stay quick: the real 1.7.0 speedups, remembering a door's files between visits and caching the emulator for a year, are untouched, so on a warm door the wait is a couple of small checks.
• A door that dies no longer floods the SysOp log or scribbles on the menu. When a door ended while its files were still coming, the transfer kept running against the seat the door had just given up. Every request wrote a "Token mismatch" security line, many a second; the files it never finished were announced as "Part of the game would not transfer"; and its progress dots and that red warning printed over the menu screen, leaving stray color codes in the middle of the art. Teardown now stops every transfer loop before its next request. After a door closes, not one request goes out and not one character is printed, whatever the door died of.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; the data/ folder is untouched and there is no schema change. Callers pick the fix up on their next page load. Nobody needs to clear caches or site data: the fixed scripts carry new version stamps, and the files a browser remembered are checked against the board before they are trusted.

1.7.0 · August 24, 2026

The DOS doors run, and your old board comes with you

The headline: real DOS doors, in the caller's browser

The games that made a BBS a place to be, LORD and its whole generation, were DOS programs. Every modern way to run them parks a telnet server next to a DOSBox install and asks the SysOp to babysit both. ATDT 1.7.0 does it the ATDT way instead: nothing DOS runs on the server. When a caller opens a DOS door, their own browser boots a small FreeDOS machine in about two seconds, the door's screen rides the caller's terminal like any other screen, and the game's files live on the board, served one read and one write at a time. The caller needs a current browser and nothing else. The server needs PHP, exactly as before.

• Install like it is 1993, run like it is 2026. A door is a folder dropped into dosdoors/ off the BBS root: the game's own files in files/, one dosdoor.json beside them naming the command line, the drop file format, and which files never change. Scan it from the new DOS Doors console page, put a DOSDOOR item on a menu, done. A shipped test door proves the whole pipeline before any real game is installed.
• A real shared drive, not a copy of one. Inside DOS the game directory is drive D:, served over a network redirector, the same trick a Novell LAN pulled. Multiple callers play the same game world at once: every write is serialized under a lock, DOS record locking arbitrates through the board exactly like SHARE on a LAN, and a generation counter tells every node's cache the moment anything changes.
• Drop files done properly. DOOR.SYS (GAP), DORINFO1.DEF and CHAIN.TXT, generated per caller per entry with the handle, level, node and daily minutes, planted where only that caller's machine can see them.
• The terminal stays the terminal. Door output is CP437 with ANSI, so it lands in the same screen, same font, same 16 colors as the rest of the board. Cursor-position reports are answered, ANSI music is swallowed instead of printed, and arrow keys arrive as the sequences doors expect. Ctrl+] three times hangs up the door: the game sees carrier drop and gets a moment to save, the way a real hangup worked.
• The SysOp holds the keys. The whole system sits behind a master switch, off by default. Per door: enable, ACS, node cap, daily minutes, a diagnostics ring that shows which file operations are slow, live seats with force disconnect, and a typed-name Reset game state that starts the world over.
• Configure the door where it lives. Every door row has a maintain page: it boots the same FreeDOS machine in your own tab, on the live game drive, with the machine's screen and keyboard facing you. Type LORDCFG.EXE and drive it; when the program exits, a real DOS prompt on D:\ is waiting for DIR, COPY, TYPE START.BAT, or an installer aimed at D:\. No DOSBox detour.
• Hardened against shared hosting. File transfers ride in filter-sized pieces with retries and a per-file fallback, because some hosts eat oversized replies whole. Batch files that lost their carriage returns to an ASCII-mode upload, which DOS abandons after one line without a word, are repaired at seed time and flagged in the Files panel.

The full chapter covers installation and the console page. Ready-made packages for The Pit, Arrowbridge II, Drakeville and TradeWars 2002 are on the site, along with known quirks for LORD and a full guide for Usurper.

The second headline: message import from legacy BBS systems

No other BBS package offers a migration path in. Every one of them assumes you are starting from nothing or already running their software. ATDT 1.7.0 makes ATDT the destination: a new console page, Import, reads the message history out of another board and brings it into ATDT areas, with the areas, authors, dates, recipients and reply threads intact.

• Every source a SysOp is likely to have. The packages people actually ran (Mystic, Synchronet, ENiGMA 1/2, Talisman, Magicka, RemoteAccess, Telegard, QuickBBS, Maximus, EleBBS, ProBoard, and WWIV by way of a QWK packet), the raw formats for those who know what they have (JAM, Squish, Synchronet SMB, Hudson, FTS-1 *.msg, QWK, ENiGMA SQLite), and a permanent third entry: the documented ATDT Import Format, a zip of JSONL files any exporter can write. That last one covers the C64, Apple II, Atari and homebrew boards no native parser will ever reach.
• Prove it before it commits. Six screens: pick the source, preview the parse with exact counts, date ranges and three real messages rendered exactly as they will be stored, map every source area onto a new or existing ATDT area, confirm behind a backed-up-data checkbox, watch the chunked progress, and a permanent Import History page.
• Careful with the past. Everything is transcoded to the CP437 repertoire with substitution counts reported (PETSCII ships its own lookup table). Dates convert through a real timezone, with two digit years pivoting at 79. FTN kludge lines are stripped; tearlines and origin lines stay, because callers saw them and they are part of the record. Literal pipes are doubled so a 1987 message cannot change screen colors.
• Threading that cannot hurt you. Messages write in ascending date order so message numbers follow chronology; orphan replies become thread roots, and reply cycles in damaged bases are detected and broken.
• Nobody drowns. After an import, every existing caller's last-read pointers move past the archive, and a seed watermark protects accounts created later.
• Undo that works. Every import is stamped with a batch id. Undo, gated behind typing UNDO, deletes every message the batch wrote and removes any area it created that is now empty. Imported authors are never matched to caller accounts: a 1991 handle colliding with a 2026 caller must not attribute someone else's words to a real person.
• Shared hosting safe. Imports run in supervised chunks from the console, no cron and no daemon, pause when the page closes, and resume from Import History.

Tested at 60,000 messages across two formats, into both new and existing areas, with the undo verified. The full chapter is here.

Smaller improvements

• The offline switch. For maintenance days: flip the board offline under Settings and nobody can connect or log in, not even a SysOp account, until it flips back. New callers get a notice in your own words and then the line drops. Callers already on stay on; a separate Disconnect everyone now button hangs up every line at once.
• Home and End, said out loud. The message list jumps to the top or bottom with Home and End, and the command line under the list now says so.
• Area descriptions earn their keep. The area picker paints the highlighted board's description on its own quiet row as the highlight moves. A new %AD code carries the current area's description into theme strings, menus and art.
• Last call is yours to set. The console user editor can set a caller's last call date on the board clock, or clear it to never. For the SysOp bringing in decades of history whose callers should not all read as if they never called.
• Brackets in handles. Handles may carry [ and ] now, a small courtesy to the C64 crowd.

Bug fixes

• Long private letters page instead of truncating. The mail room used to cut a letter off at the bottom of the screen. It now pages with N and P and a page indicator.
• Theme copies now offer every string. The strings editor used to list only the keys present in the theme's own file, so a theme duplicated under an older release never showed the strings added since. The editor now lists the complete catalog: your values where you customized, the default marked inherited where you did not.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. The first page hit climbs the schema ladder: new tables for import batches and staging, new tables for DOS doors, sessions and locks, all additive only and safe to re-run. If you keep theme copies, the console greets you once with the new-strings notice.

1.6.5 · August 17, 2026

Rooms of their own

This release is about giving parts of your board their own message life. A menu item can now point a message command at a specific board; a menu can keep its own current area, separate from the rest of the system; and an area can step out of the general list without giving up anything else. Build a door-game lounge with its own boards, a language-split board with parallel message trees, a private co-SysOp wing, or an area picker drawn entirely in your own ANSI: all of it from the menu designer, no code. And if you set none of it up, nothing anywhere changes. Every new field ships blank, and blank means exactly the board you already run.

Point a menu item at a board

The Read, Post and New scan items grew an optional Area field in the menu designer. Set it and that one item acts on that one board, for that press only. The caller's current area does not move, on that menu or anywhere else; reply, quote and everything inside the reader behave exactly as they always have.

The classic use is a game lounge: a menu whose "Strategy board" reads straight into SUZ_STRAT, a "Chronicles" item beside it, a post item, and the door itself. Players talk shop without ever leaving the lounge or losing their place on the rest of the board.

Targeting never bypasses access: an item aimed at a board the caller cannot read shows the standard denial. An item aimed at a tag that no longer exists tells the caller the board is gone and logs a warning naming the menu, the key and the tag. A mis-typed item is a thirty-second fix, not a mystery.

Hand-built area lists, two flavors

Two new MODULE keys let a menu select the current area directly, and between them they cover both kinds of hand-built picker.

• setarea stays on the menu. Put the board keys beside Read, Post and New scan on one combined menu and the menu itself becomes the picker: press a number to switch boards, press R to read, never leave the screen. This is the natural fit for a themed section, and it works on a full-screen ANSI backdrop with hidden hotkeys just as well as on a generated menu.
• setareaback picks and returns. Build a standalone area list as its own menu, reached by GOTO from wherever your message commands live. Picking a board sets it and steps the caller straight back to the menu they came from, exactly like the stock picker does. Draw it in ANSI and you have replaced the system area list with your own.

Both keys require an area in the designer, both respect Read ACS like everything else, and after either press the menu repaints in full, so a template showing %AN or %MC names the new area immediately. With the filtered picker below, that makes three interchangeable doors to the same mechanism: the system picker that returns, the combined menu that stays, and your own picker that returns.

Sections with their own current area

Every menu's form gained a collapsed Area scope (advanced) section. Leave it alone and the menu behaves as it always has. Give it a short name, such as DE or LOUNGE, and that menu keeps its own current message area, remembered per caller between calls, completely separate from the board's. Menus that share a name share the area; a Default area picks where callers start, and their choice sticks per section.

A language-split board finally reads like one: a German section and an English section, each with its own boards and its own sense of "where I was reading," while the stock message menu carries on untouched. Inside a scoped menu, %AN and %MC in a template speak for the section's own area, so "Area: %AN" on a section menu names the right board.

A picker for one shelf

An Area change item can name a category: the picker then shows just that shelf. Boards you unlisted still show inside it; you hand-picked that list, after all. A category name that no longer matches falls back to the full list and logs one warning.

Unlisted areas

Areas grew a Listed checkbox, checked by default. Uncheck it and the area leaves the general area-change list, and changes nothing else. It still counts, still opens from any item that names it, and still reports to the global new scan for anyone who passes its Read ACS.

Unlisted is discovery, not security. A public-but-unlisted lounge will announce itself in a caller's new scan. If you want a section genuinely private, gate it with Read ACS; the edit form nudges you about exactly this when an unlisted area is readable by everyone.

Tidy the public room

Every public chat line on the console's live wire now carries a delete link. One click and a confirm removes that line from the room for good, with an audit line in the SysOp log recording who said what. Pages and private SysOp traffic are working records; the link never appears on them, and the guard refuses them outright.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. The first page hit climbs the schema ladder:

• Four new columns and one small table appear: the Listed flag, the menu scope fields, the item's second argument, and the per-section current-area store. All blank, all inert until you use them.
• Nothing is copied or migrated. The board's existing current-area bookkeeping is not touched, read or moved. A board that never opens the new fields runs byte-identically to 1.6.1.
• Housekeeping runs itself. Deleting an area that a menu item targets is refused with a list of the referencing items; renaming a tag follows through everywhere; stale per-section selections sweep on the daily tick.
• Theme copies get the one-time notice about two new denial strings, if you keep copies; the shipped default theme already carries them.

1.6.1 · August 13, 2026

The bell follows you

A small release with a doorman's sensibilities: the application desk learns which names are not welcome, a page rings the SysOp's own pocket instead of an empty console, and the message boards stop marking things read that nobody actually read.

Prohibited names at the application desk

Settings › Access grew a prohibited-words list, one word per line, with sysop already on it. A new caller's handle is refused if it contains a listed word anywhere, in any case: put test on the list and Test, Testicle and Youtestit are all turned away at the door. Nothing is retroactive; the list is read only when a new application is typed, and every existing account keeps its name.

An applicant who tries three prohibited names in a row is done applying: the board shows them the address they are calling from, notes that address in the security log, and drops the line. Any clean attempt in between, even a malformed or taken one, resets the count; the rule is three in a row, exactly as it reads. The refusal and the goodbye are theme strings like everything else the caller sees (nua.banned_handle, banned_bye, banned_ip), so a themed board can word its own bouncer.

Pages reach your pocket

A caller paging the SysOp has always lit the console, but nobody sits in the console all day. Settings grew a SysOp notifications card: enable it on a browser, desktop or phone, and every page arrives as a real system push notification naming who is calling, which node, and the reason they gave, whether or not the console is open anywhere. Tap it and the console comes to you, ready to answer on their line.

• Standard Web Push, zero baggage. VAPID keys are minted by the board itself on first use and the board talks directly to the browser's push service. No libraries, no third-party accounts, no snippet of anyone else's JavaScript.
• Strictly opt-in. Exactly like outgoing mail: no browser enabled, no outside connection is ever made. Enable as many browsers as you like, remove any of them from the same card, and send yourself a test ring to hear what a page feels like.
• Never in a caller's way. Pushes are sent best-effort with short timeouts; a push service having a bad day cannot slow the caller whose page is ringing. Dead subscriptions prune themselves.

Browsers require HTTPS for push. Boards on plain HTTP keep the console bell, and the card says so instead of failing quietly.

Only what you read is read

Message lists run newest-first, so a caller often opens a fresh reply before an older message they have not seen. The read pointer used to leap straight over that older message and silently mark it read: the reply was read, the message below it never was, and the new-scan walked on by. The bookkeeping is honest now, and each message is marked read when it is actually on the screen. The unread markers and the new-scan keep pointing at what was skipped, and the pointer catches up on its own the moment the gap is walked. Nothing changes in how reading feels; only the ledger stopped rounding up.

A quiet week no longer empties the chat room

The housekeeping cron used to sweep every chat row older than seven days, the public room included, so a board with a slow week woke up to a blank room. The room is the board's living room: it now keeps its newest 1,000 lines however old they are, and age never empties it; only the overflow beyond the cap is swept. Transient wire traffic (page requests, private SysOp lines and their hang-up markers) still expires after a week, exactly as it should.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. The first page hit climbs the schema ladder: two small tables appear (individual read marks, and the SysOp's push subscriptions), the prohibited-words list seeds itself with sysop (only when the setting has never existed, so a board that deliberately emptied the list stays empty), and theme copies get the one-time notice about the three new application-desk strings. The shipped default theme already carries them.

1.6.0 · August 10, 2026

Themes that travel, and a board that minds the line

Everything that changed from 1.5.5 to 1.6.0, in one place.

New features

• Themes travel as one file. Every theme on the Themes page has an Export link that downloads the whole look as a single .atdt-theme.json: strings, settings, art bindings, and the ANSI art itself packed inside. The new Import a theme card takes such a file and installs everything in one step. The art lands in the board's gallery, a taken theme name is uniqued, and clashing art names are handled byte by byte: identical pieces are shared rather than duplicated, different pieces are renamed with the theme's bindings remapped to follow. An import can never overwrite art you already have. Built for trading themes between boards, and for a theme shelf on the ATDT web site.
• Idle callers hang up. Anyone quiet for 30 minutes, at any screen including the login matrix, is logged off with a polite note and NO CARRIER, and the node frees up. Idle means no keypresses: an abandoned open tab cannot hold a line just by keeping the browser connected. The minutes are adjustable in Settings (0 disables).
• Log off a caller from the console. Who's Online on the Dashboard grew a Log off button per line. The caller sees "The SysOp has closed this line." and NO CARRIER; the action asks first and lands in the admin log.
• Split-screen SysOp chat. Settings offers a second style for break-ins and answered pages: the caller types in the top half of the screen, the SysOp's words fill the bottom half, and a labeled rule divides them, a proper old-style sysop chat. Classic (one shared scroll) remains the default; the console side is the same either way.
• The board has a line speed. A new Line speed setting (default 9600) is the board's own baud: brand-new callers start there instead of at a hard-coded number, the pre-login screen always types out at it, and the connect banner shows the matching CONNECT 9600, or CONNECT 14400 with the throttle off. Picking below 9600 earns a word of caution on save: charming to modem veterans, possibly "broken" to everyone else.
• %BD, a new MCI code. Expands to the viewer's connection speed, their own throttle if they set one, otherwise the board's line speed, and reads FAST when the throttle is off. Works everywhere MCI works, ANSI art included.
• The message boards, in the console. Community grew a Message boards tab listing every category and board exactly as callers see them, with live counts. Open any message to edit its subject, body, or date and time stamp, or to delete it (soft, same as caller-side deletes). The author and the message's place in the reply tree are facts of the record and never change. Private mail is excluded at the query level: the console does not read anyone's letters.
• Theme upgrades speak up. Standing rule, now permanent policy: a release only ever updates the shipped default theme, never your copies. Every release that adds or rewords caller-facing strings now arms a one-time notice on the console dashboard listing exactly which strings changed; a board that skipped versions sees the union of everything it missed. This release's list: the matrix reset strings and the split-chat labels.
• The Bulletins hint in the console no longer claims callers read them under [B]; that key is yours to remap in the menu designer.

Bug fixes

• Changing message areas ignored the throttle. Entering a message area painted the whole screen instantly regardless of connection speed: every screen that takes line input armed its prompt by fast-forwarding the reveal. Prompts now wait their turn, the screen types out at the wire speed, and the input field arms when it finishes. A keypress still fast-forwards, as always.
• The goodbye screen ignored the throttle. Logging off painted the farewell, custom ANSI or default, instantly and dropped the line. The goodbye now reveals at the caller's speed and the line waits for it to finish before NO CARRIER.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. The first page hit climbs the schema ladder (sessions gain idle-tracking and hang-up columns). If you keep theme copies, the console greets you once with the new-strings notice described above.

1.5.5 · August 4, 2026

The editor release

Big ANSI letters without drawing them by hand, a recolor tool, visual move and copy, a gallery you can browse, and doors that can post their own announcements to a message board.

New features

• ANSI letter fonts, TheDraw style. The editor grows a Font tool: pick a font, click the canvas, and type. Big letters land as ANSI, no more drawing every welcome-screen letter by hand. Four fonts ship (Block, Block Wide, Block Shadow, Small), covering A to Z and 0 to 9 and stamping in your current ink. The font library (Fonts... next to the tool) is its own little editor: draw your own sets glyph by glyph, up to 16 by 8 cells each, colors and all, and fonts you draw stamp exactly as drawn. Stored under data/fonts/.
• Recolor without retyping. A new Recolor tool (C) repaints what is already on the canvas with the current ink and leaves the characters alone; with a selection, the new Tint button recolors the whole block at once.
• Move and Copy are visual now. Move used to be a blind cut-then-click; now the selection visibly lifts off the canvas and rides the mouse (or the arrow keys, with Shift moving by five). Enter or a click sets it down, Esc puts it back untouched, and the whole move is a single undo step. Copy floats the same way.
• Clear canvas. A Clear button blanks the whole canvas. It asks first, and Undo can still bring the work back.
• The Gallery page. A new console page shows every piece on the shelf with a real preview, ten to a page, with an "Open in editor" button on each card. The dropdowns stay for small boards; this is for the big ones.
• Message boards by arrow key. Callers can now select the message board they want to view with the arrow keys plus Enter.
• Doors can make announcements. A door's daily cron hook and its console panel can post a real message into a message area of the SysOp's choosing, under the SysOp's name, and read recent board rumors for flavor. Both calls are mediated by the engine, so doors still never touch a board table. Built for games that publish on their own clock, and fully backward compatible with existing doors. See the Door API.

Bug fixes

• Goodbye art no longer loses its top rows. The signoff screen painted its art without clearing first, so the picture flowed from wherever the logoff prompt had left the cursor and scrolled its own first line or two off the top. Goodbye art now gets a clean screen like every other art display, and +++ NO CARRIER prints on row 25 instead of pushing the picture up, so even a full-height piece keeps every row.
• %LC shows the last caller again, not you. The token read the newest logged call, which after login is the caller's own, so the welcome line greeted everyone with their own name. It now skips the current session's call; calling twice in a row still counts your previous call.
• Bulletins list newest first, on the board and in the console. A SysOp's manual sort still rules, and the logon tour for new callers still walks history oldest-first, as designed.
• Descenders survive the editor. Letters like y and g lost their tails in the ANSI editor (the board always rendered them right): resizing the editor canvas silently reset the text baseline, pushing descenders into the next row's repaint. The painter now pins its baseline on every draw.
• "Generated" that would not come back. Picking the generated layout for a menu looked broken when a per-level variant kept overriding it, a state easy to set up and hard to see. The menu designer now says so next to the backdrop picker, and saving "generated" over live variants spells it out in the flash message, with the count.
• SysOp chat and break-in actually work. It did not work at all half of the time, and the other half it did not work as intended. Now it does.
• More than eight message boards display. Previously, if you had more than eight message boards, there was no way to scroll the list. Now you can.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched and there is no schema change. data/fonts/ appears the first time a font is saved.

1.5.0 · August 1, 2026

The mail release

ATDT can now, entirely at your option, send email: password-reset links for callers and private letters to the SysOp. Switched off (the default), the board keeps making no outside connections at all, exactly as before.

New features

• Outgoing mail (optional). A new card in Settings lets the board send email through a mailbox you own (SMTP) or the hosting company's mail system. Send-only: the board never reads a mailbox. A one-click test message proves the setup, and every send lands in the events log.
• Password reset by email. With mail on, a caller who fumbles their password can press R at the login screen. If the handle has an email on file, a single-use reset link (20-minute clock) goes out, leading to a small browser page that sets a new password. The board answers the same sentence whether or not the account exists, and SysOp accounts are excluded on purpose.
• Email on the account. New applicants get an optional email question, existing callers without one get a one-line ask at logon (ENTER skips it), and the caller settings screen can set, change, or clear it any time. Never verified, never shown to other callers; only the SysOp sees it, and it exists for password resets and nothing else.
• Email the SysOp. A new EMAILSYSOP menu action gives callers a private line off the board: subject plus a full-screen letter, sent from the board's account to the address the menu item names, with the caller's own email as Reply-To. One letter per caller per day; the item hides itself while mail is off.
• A caller guide to the codes. A new HELP menu action shows a two-page guide: every pipe color code painted in its own color, then the full MCI variable table with live examples.
• The mail room shows sent letters. Press S in the mail room to flip between your inbox and the letters you have sent, with who they went to and a full read-back view.

Bug fixes

• SysOp, spelled properly. The console now writes SysOp with the capital S and O everywhere: top bar, footer, login page, and every label in between.
• ART picker. The ART menu action in the menu designer offers a dropdown of gallery pieces instead of a type-the-name field, matching every other action.
• Full-width rumors and oneliners. The entry prompt sits on its own row, so the whole 79 columns fit and nothing is cut off mid-thought.
• The rumor wall keeps its secret. The caller-side rumor screen shows a count and takes submissions but never lists the pile, so the one-random-rumor logon surprise stays a surprise. The SysOp reads the whole list in the console's Community desk.
• Every unread bulletin at logon. Callers see every bulletin they have not read yet, oldest first, not just the latest; a brand-new caller walks the whole backlog once. Each account keeps its own high-water mark, so nothing replays, and editing a bulletin does not re-greet callers who already saw it.
• The auto-message wall is caller-editable again. The menu item's ACS is the one and only gate, as designed. The console's Community desk also gains an Auto-message tab showing the current wall, who painted it and when, with an editor of its own.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board; data/ is untouched. The first page hit migrates the database automatically (new per-account email, bulletin bookmark, and reset fields). Existing callers' bulletin marks start at the current top, so nobody is greeted by years of old bulletins. The "Allow pipe colors in caller content" switch now ships on for brand-new installs; an upgrading board keeps its earlier choice. All mail features stay dormant until you configure and enable outgoing mail in Settings.

1.1.1 · July 28, 2026

MCI variables everywhere, including inside the art

New features

• MCI variables work everywhere. The live board codes (%HN for the handle, %BN for the board name, %TM for the time, and the rest of Appendix B in the manual) now expand in every place the board shows text, whoever typed them, SysOp or caller: message and private mail bodies and subjects, bulletin bodies, oneliners, rumors, the auto-message, chat, BBS-list notes, and the broadcast banner. Each reader sees their own values: a message that says "hi %HN" greets every reader by name, and a broadcast can promise "back at %TM". Unknown %-pairs pass through untouched, and expansion happens at display time only, so the stored text keeps the codes.
• MCI works inside ANSI art. Codes drawn into any .ans piece expand when the art is shown: the connect, logon and goodbye screens, menu backdrops and per-level variants, ART menu items, and art bulletins. Draw "WELCOME TO %BN, %HN" into a logon screen and it greets every caller by name. On the connect screen, before anyone logs in, %HN reads "caller". A substituted value shifts the rest of its row, so leave drawing room around the code.

Bug fixes

• A pipe character typed into a message or mail subject no longer displays doubled in the reader and mail-room headers; it shows single, exactly as typed.

1.1.0 · July 28, 2026

Copy and paste, an art gallery, and doors that behave like everything else

New features

• Copy and paste in the terminal. Paste with Ctrl+V, Cmd+V, or the context menu: the text types into whatever accepts typing, whether that is a prompt line or the full-screen message editor, where pasted newlines become real line breaks. Drag a rectangle anywhere on the screen and it lands on the clipboard at mouse release, the classic terminal way.
• Board phone number. Settings › Identity takes a Board number. The connect ceremony dials it and %PH carries it into any theme string. Leave it blank for the classic number derived from the board name.
• A selectable default theme. Settings › Look and feel picks the theme every caller sees. Individual callers can still be pinned to a specific theme on the Users page, where "(board default)" now follows the Settings choice. No more applying a new look account by account.
• The art gallery. The ANSI editor saves to one board-wide gallery in data/art/ instead of per-theme slots. Everywhere art can appear picks a piece from the same shelf by name: theme connect, logon and goodbye bindings with live previews on the Themes page, menu backdrops and per-level variants, ANSI bulletins, and ART menu items. Import and export are unchanged, and art from older boards moves into the gallery automatically on upgrade.
• IP bans with a proper goodbye. Settings › Access takes a ban list, either exact addresses or prefix* wildcards. A banned caller gets a themed refusal, the connect.banned string, editable like any other, before the connect ceremony even starts. A ban landing mid-call drops the line on the next keystroke.
• The SysOp console footer now shows the running ATDT version.

Bug fixes

• Doors are ordinary menu items. Any menu named DOORS used to synthesize its door entries at render time, invisible to the menu designer and impossible to edit. Door items are now real menu items: seeded for the shipped games, added automatically when a scan registers a new door, and renameable, reorderable and removable like anything else. Existing boards gain the items on upgrade.
• Chat lines wrap instead of vanishing. A long chat line used to clip at the right edge. It now word-wraps onto up to three display rows, colors carried across the fold, so every typed character shows. Public chat and the private SysOp line both.
• One handle, one node. The same account can no longer be logged in on two nodes at once. A second login is refused with a themed message while the first is live, and a dropped connection frees the handle within about 90 seconds.
• The default theme is truly read-only. Saving art used to silently make the shipped default theme editable, strings included, and arm a Remove button that could destroy SysOp-drawn art. The default is now the board's permanent fallback: never editable, never removable, regardless of what the editor or the test suite left on disk. Duplicate it and edit the copy, then set the copy as the board default in Settings.
• Removed stale pre-release copy from the console's Doors page and the menu designer's action list.

Upgrading

Overlay-upload the release over your existing board. data/ is untouched and the first page hit migrates everything, including from 1.0.0 or any earlier schema. Skipped versions climb every rung of the ladder in one go, under a lock, and the new steps are safe to re-run.

1.0.0 · July 25, 2026

Initial release

The whole board, finished and documented. Everything below shipped in the box.

• The terminal. 80 by 25 CP437 rendered with a real IBM VGA font, hotkey menus, line prompts, a full-screen message editor, iCE color support, and an optional connect ceremony.
• Messages. Areas grouped into categories, a threaded reader, new-scan across areas, and private mail.
• Community. Bulletins, oneliners, rumors, a voting booth, the auto-message wall, a BBS directory, user list, last callers and who's online.
• Chat. One public room with scrollback, page SysOp, SysOp break-in on a private line, and timed broadcast banners.
• The console. Dashboard, users and access levels, access strings, a live menu designer, themes, a full ANSI editor, the community desk, door registry, and three logs.
• Doors. HILO and Star Merchant, plus the version 1 Door API with private tables, a key/value store, cron and admin hooks, and a JSON drop file.
• Operations. A self-locking web installer, SQLite or MySQL, real cron or pseudo-cron, and single-folder backups.