Changelog

All notable changes to SlateChat are documented here. Format loosely follows Keep a Changelog, versions follow SemVer.

The ## [x.y.z] section matching the version in gradle.properties is what the CI pipeline publishes as the GitLab release's patch notes when that file changes on the default branch (main) — see .gitlab-ci.yml.

[1.7.0] - 2026-08-07

Added

• Private messaging: /tell (aliases /msg, /w), /r to reply to whoever you last exchanged a tell with (either direction), and /socialspy for staff to watch other players' tells. Standalone, same-server only for now. Off by default (modules.tell.enable: false) — plenty of servers already run their own tell/msg solution and this shouldn't start competing with it uninvited. Formats and messages live in a new tell.yml. The recipient's copy includes a clickable [reply] by default (<reply> placeholder, reply_button in tell.yml). A vanished player (any vanish plugin — detected via Player#canSee, not a specific plugin's own convention) never shows up in tab-complete or as a reachable target, indistinguishable from being offline, unless the sender has chat.tell.vanish.bypass. chat.tell.spy.bypass makes a player's tells fully invisible to /socialspy watchers (not just redacted) while still always logging to console. When enabled, /tell itself is open to everyone unless restrict: true in tell.yml, in which case it needs chat.tell — that node, like every other one this release adds, is hardcoded rather than configurable, so a typo can never silently break the command server-wide.
• Chat color GUI: bare /chatcolor (still needs chat.setcolor) now opens a picker instead of printing a usage message — the 16 standard colors as dyed leather chestplates (a real RGB match per color, not an approximated wool/dye swatch), a reset button, and a book that opens an anvil-based hex picker with a live color preview as you type. Typed /chatcolor <color> also now accepts MiniMessage color tags (<red>, <#4dc3ff>), not just legacy &c/hex #rrggbb. The book/hex-picker can be turned off (menu.hex_picker: false) or pointed at a server's own custom GUI command instead (custom + menu.hex_picker_command) — useful since Paper has no way to give an already-open anvil a real title, so a custom-font GUI-texture background can't apply to that one screen the way it can the rest of the menu. Every icon in both screens is reskinnable per-role through ItemsAdder (menu.itemsadder.* in color.yml), falling back to the plain vanilla item whenever ItemsAdder isn't installed or the configured ID isn't found.
• Join/quit/first-join messages: custom join/quit/first_join broadcasts (new joinquit.yml). Off by default (modules.joinquit.enable: false), same reasoning as tell above — plenty of servers already have their own join/quit message plugin. <player> is always available, <online>/<max> are supported but left out of the shipped defaults. chat.join.bypass silences all three for a player, in either direction — covers vanished staff without needing to detect any particular vanish plugin's state.
• Paper Hangar listed alongside the existing download page and GitLab Releases as an official distribution channel.

Changed

• Full documentation moved off this repo's own docs/ (now removed) onto deepslate.ch as the single canonical source, instead of two copies that could drift out of sync with each other.
• config.yml, and the other module config files, reorganized into clearly labeled sections (general/channel/update-checker/console messages, then modules grouped by Chat/Integrations/Maintenance) — no keys renamed or moved, purely cosmetic after several releases' worth of additions had piled up with no structure.
• ItemsAdder's :emoji_name: tab-complete/suggestion logic, previously private to ChannelCommand, extracted into a shared EmojiSuggestions so /tell could reuse it instead of a second copy.

[1.6.0] - 2026-08-07

Added

• Full Folia support (folia-supported: true in plugin.yml). Chat delivery no longer assumes a single server thread: sender-side formatting (placeholders, MineDown/MiniMessage rendering, <selector>/<score>/<nbt> resolution) runs on the sending player's own region thread, and each recipient — message delivery and the actionbar read-receipt count alike — is handled independently on their own region thread, since Folia only allows a player's location/permissions/messaging to be touched by the thread that actually owns them. Verified on a live Folia server: broadcast channels, radius-limited local channels (including recipients on the other side of a region boundary), the read-receipt count, and the "no color permission" heads-up all behave identically to Paper.

Changed

• Message's recipient fan-out (send()) was rewritten as a scatter/gather over each online player's own scheduler (new MessageDelivery) instead of one thread looping over everyone's location directly — required for the Folia support above. A player disconnecting mid-send, sender or recipient, can no longer leave the read-receipt count hanging or throw the message away silently. The radius/world eligibility check itself moved into a small pure function (new RecipientEligibility), which also collapses what used to be the same check written out twice (once for delivery, once for the count) into one place.

[1.5.0] - 2026-08-06

Added

• Bare http(s):// URLs typed straight into chat are now clickable automatically (with a hover showing the URL) — no need for the [text](url) MineDown syntax, though that still works exactly as before and can still be used for custom link text. Not gated by any permission, matching MineDown's own link syntax.
• /slatechat wiki links to the plugin's documentation (deepslate.ch) as a clickable message — the URL (wiki_url in config.yml) is editable. Open to everyone, no permission required.
• Documented the full list of valid <pride> flag names (docs/formatting-advanced.md) — the tag already accepted them, they just weren't written down anywhere.

Fixed

• <head>/<sprite> rendered tinted by whatever color was active where they sat (a channel's own color, or a sender's %chat_color%) instead of the texture's real colors — a message like <yellow>...<head:Notch> hi painted the skin yellow. Wrapped in <white> plus all five decorations forced off, all real MiniMessage tags that close and revert cleanly. <reset> was tried first and reverted: it turns out to not be scoped by its own closing tag the way it looks (see Changed below), so the color of everything after the head/sprite fell back to Minecraft's plain default instead of surviving like it should have.
• convertLegacyToMiniMessage did a blind whole-string replace with no regard for existing <...> tag boundaries — found while building the URL auto-link above: a URL query string containing &background=, &color=, etc. would get its &b/&c/etc. silently rewritten into a color tag mid-URL, corrupting both the click target and the link's own visible text. Now skips tag content the same way convertHexToMiniMessage already did for the equivalent hex-color bug (see [1.3.0]).
• /slatechat reload crashing outright with a NullPointerException (and, once that was fixed, an IllegalStateException) — both were the same root cause described in Changed below: registering a Brigadier command from a live command's own execution isn't something Paper's API supports.

Changed

• Commands (/ch, /chatcolor, /slatechat, and one per configured channel) now register through Paper's Brigadier LifecycleEvents.COMMANDS API instead of reflecting into PluginCommand's private constructor and the server's private commandMap — the exact thing the README's "no NMS, no version-specific internals" claim never quite covered. plugin.yml no longer declares any commands, and api-version moved from a very stale 1.13 to 1.21 to match the Paper API this project actually targets. One deliberate, narrow exception remains: Paper's Brigadier dispatcher can only be mutated while that one lifecycle event is actively dispatching (at boot, or an actual /reload confirm) — never from a live command's own execution, confirmed the hard way by the crashes fixed above — so a channel whose command name is brand new since boot (not just an edited existing one) still goes through the old reflection technique to become reachable without a full server restart. Isolated to its own file (LegacyCommandRegistrar), used from exactly one call site, and documented in code as the deliberate exception it is.
• Restricted channels' commands are now hidden from tab-complete/help using the same blocksSender() rule the rest of the plugin already uses everywhere else, instead of the native PluginCommand.permission field — which had no way to express "restricted with no permission node configured = OP only", a case blocksSender() has always handled correctly.

[1.4.0] - 2026-08-06

Added

• Restricted channels (channels.yml restrict: true) now wire their permission node natively into Bukkit, so the channel's command (/l, /g, etc.) is hidden from tab-complete and /help for senders who lack it. Trade-off worth knowing: Bukkit checks this before the command runs, so a sender without permission now sees the server's generic denial message there instead of SlateChat's own configurable no_permission — that message still shows for /ch and everywhere else, since this only affects the per-channel command's own native permission check.
• Typing a color (legacy &c or raw MiniMessage <red>/etc.) directly in chat without chat.colored now gets a quiet action-bar heads-up (the same no_permission message) — the message itself still sends normally, just without the color, same as before; previously there was no feedback at all.
• MineDown formatting args now accept a ! prefix to force a decoration off — [Text](!bold) — using MiniMessage's own inversion syntax.

Fixed

• <reset> typed in chat without chat.colored could wipe out the channel's own established color (e.g. a channel format's <yellow>...<message>), not just the player's — because the channel format and the player's message are parsed as one single MiniMessage string, <reset> doesn't know the difference. It's now stripped like the other color-family tags: with it gone, the channel's color falls through normally instead of resetting to Minecraft's plain default. With chat.colored, <reset> still works exactly as documented by Adventure.
• [Text](underline) MineDown shorthand silently did nothing — underline was never a real MiniMessage tag name or alias (the real one is underlined; u is the alias). Docs described the same wrong spelling. Both fixed.
• [Text](!bold) MineDown shorthand was recognized as valid input but silently produced no effect — see Added above.
• A bare > character outside a tag (e.g. a channel format's own <player><bold>> separator) was silently deleted by the hex-conversion step introduced earlier in this same version — its tag/plain-text splitter excluded > from both alternatives, so a lone one matched neither and Matcher.find() skipped over it without a trace.
• The action-bar "no permission for color" heads-up (see Added) and a channel's own read-receipt count both only ever show the last action bar sent — since the heads-up fired earlier in the pipeline, the read-receipt silently overwrote it before it could be seen. They're now combined into a single action-bar send when both apply.
• A restricted channel (restrict: true) with no permission configured blocked every sender, including OP — every other permission check in the plugin already lets OP bypass an undeclared/misconfigured node by default; this was the one exception, and could lock the server owner out of their own channel over a config typo.

Changed

• Large internal cleanup, no other behavior change intended: Message.kt (previously one 436-line class doing filtering, permission-gating, rendering, three separate plugin integrations, console logging, and recipient targeting all at once) split into single-responsibility pieces under core/format and core/integrations. plugin.description (deprecated) replaced with Paper's plugin.pluginMeta throughout. The 16 Minecraft color names and 5 decorations, previously hand-typed across several places, now come from Adventure's own NamedTextColor.NAMES/TextDecoration.NAMES in one shared source each (this is what surfaced the underline/!bold bugs above). Project's first unit tests added (48, all passing) covering the newly-extracted pure logic.

[1.3.0] - 2026-08-06

Added

• Shadow color, transition, and pride MiniMessage tags (chat.colored-gated, shadow color also has a MineDown shortcut: [Text](shadow:#hex)).
• Keybind, insertion, font, translatable (lang/lang_or), player head, and sprite MiniMessage tags, gated behind a new chat.cosmetic permission. Note: <head>/<sprite> require Paper 1.21.10+ (Adventure 4.25.0) — on older servers the tag is silently unrecognized regardless of permission.
• Entity selector, scoreboard, and NBT MiniMessage tags, gated behind a new chat.advanced permission (OP-only by default — these can expose live server state). Resolved against the message sender via Paper's PaperComponents.resolveWithContext (needs Paper 1.21.4+; older servers fall back to showing the raw pattern, e.g. @e[limit=5], instead of resolved names).
• debug config option — logs the fully processed message string plus the raw component JSON for every chat message. Off by default, noisy; only meant for troubleshooting.
• console_format_colors config option — renders console/log output with real ANSI colors (via Paper's ComponentLogger) instead of plain text.

Fixed

• Players without chat.colored could bypass the color restriction entirely by typing raw MiniMessage tags (<red>, <gradient:...>, etc.) directly instead of MineDown syntax — only legacy &/hex codes were being stripped. Now the whole color-tag family is stripped consistently, MineDown args and raw tags alike.
• <gradient:#hex:#hex>, <transition:#hex:#hex>, and <shadow:#hex> (raw-typed, MineDown-generated, or baked into channels.yml) were silently broken — hex-to-MiniMessage conversion ran indiscriminately over the whole string and rewrote hex color arguments into nested <#hex> tags, which MiniMessage can't parse as a color, so the tag fell back to literal text. Hex conversion now skips content already inside a tag.
• <!shadow> (the disable-shadow alias) wasn't covered by the chat.colored gate — the regex only accounted for </tag> closing syntax, not <!tag>.
• <selector>/<score>/<nbt> reached the client unresolved (showing the raw pattern, e.g. @e[limit=5], instead of resolved names) because nothing ever supplied Paper the sender context these components need to render server-side — see Added above.
• Console log only ever stripped legacy & codes, leaving raw MiniMessage tags (<selector:...>, <yellow>, etc.) visible as literal text; now properly deserialized and rendered as plain text (or ANSI colors with console_format_colors), with hover/click content naturally excluded either way.
• GitLab releases shipped with no real patch notes (just a bare "SlateChat x.y.z" description) — the CI pipeline now pulls the matching version section from this changelog instead.

Changed

• Docs reorganized by audience: docs/formatting.md now covers only everyday chat syntax, docs/formatting-advanced.md covers admin/config-only tags, and docs/permissions.md is now the single canonical permission table (previously duplicated across the README and two other docs).

[1.2.0] - 2026-08-05

Added

• ItemsAdder compatibility — its :name: font-image shorthand (emoji, rank badges, custom icons) resolves wherever SlateChat renders text, respecting each font image's own permission.
• Update checker — checks GitLab's releases API on startup and notifies admins with chat.update; /slatechat update checks on demand.

Fixed

• /slatechat reload no longer leaves already-connected players pointing at stale channel objects.

Changed

• Moved off the legacy Bukkit scheduler and Bukkit.getLogger() in favor of Paper's Folia-aware scheduler and the plugin's own SLF4J-backed logger.
• Dropped legacy Bukkit ChatColor from channel format loading in favor of Adventure/MiniMessage throughout.

[1.1.0] - 2026-08-04

Fixed

• DiscordSRV per-channel routing — a SlateChat channel is now only forwarded if it's explicitly mapped in DiscordSRV's own Channels config, instead of hardcoded aliases.

[1.0.0] - 2026-08-03

Initial SlateChat release — rebrand from the original SimplexChat project, migrated from Java to Kotlin targeting Minecraft 1.21.x, with the CI pipeline that auto-builds and releases on a gradle.properties (formerly pom.xml) version bump.