v2.8.4: **The first complete release since 2.8.1**

The first complete release since 2.8.1

2.8.2 and 2.8.3 both went out public and both were missing things. GitHub
answered 502 Bad Gateway partway through the 148 MB AppImage upload, and
because each build published its own artifacts as it went, that one failure
took the whole Linux build down with it — deb, rpm and metadata included, none
of which had anything wrong. Worse, the release went live anyway: the check
that exists to stop a half-empty one sits in a job that runs only after all
four builds succeed, so a failed build skipped it. Neither release ever
carried an Android APK, so the phone never saw either version, and neither
carried latest-linux.yml, so no Linux desktop could update to them.

Building and publishing are now separate. Nothing is public until every build
has finished and the release has been checked — by name, not by count: 2.8.3
had eight artifacts, which looked healthy, and three of them were blockmaps.

Channels that came back on their own

• Take a channel out of a network's join-on-connect list, restart, and find it
  back. Three different causes over three reports; this is the last of them.
  The phone lists every conversation it has a page of when it opens, so it can
  be read with no signal — which is right for a person and wrong for a channel
  you are no longer in. A server that once put everybody in a channel leaves a
  page of it behind for good, so the entry outlived the joins, the settings,
  and the server setting that caused it. A channel is listed now only where
  you are in it or mean to be.
• Leaving a channel while offline did nothing at all. Wanting out is two
  things — a message to the server, and a decision about the list your client
  dials every time it connects — and only the first needed a connection. With
  the network down the desktop failed silently, the phone said "that was not
  sent", and the next connection walked straight back in. The decision is
  recorded now whether or not there is anything to send it down.

Link previews are cards again

• Every preview image and every favicon had been thrown away before it reached
  the window, on every site, for as long as that code has existed — a check
  meant to refuse addresses inside your own network was being asked about host
  names, and said yes to all of them. Previews were a title and a coloured
  line, and it read as sites that simply had no picture.
• They come back as cards now: who the page belongs to, what it says, and what
  it looks like. The phone had no picture in its cards at all and now has one.

Up amends your last message

• On networks that carry edits, pressing Up in an empty message box opens the
  last thing you said, ready to fix — rather than typing it out again for you
  to send twice. Escape cancels, Enter saves, and the cursor comes back to
  where you were typing.
• The Edit action also stopped being offered in two places it never worked: on
  a server that does not carry edits, where the "edit" would have arrived as a
  second message, and on a /me, which it would have turned into an ordinary
  line.

A way back to the present

• Scroll up a screenful or more and both clients now offer a way back to the
  newest message. The desktop's used to appear about one line up, so it was
  always there; the phone had none.

Shapes

• The rail is one shape now. It used to be a circle at rest that squared off
  when selected, so Messages and Mentions never matched the networks below
  them.

Also

• Both clients say what they are: Settings → About has the version, the build
  date, and the licence in full.
• The phone's notification has a Switch off, which stops the connections,
  hands them back to your desktop and closes the app — the first version to
  reach a phone with it.

The Android build is debug-signed as before and upgrades in place
(versionCode 22).