Messages

In-world messages are Narratives with supertype Message. The narrator is the Character credited with the message, characters names its recipients, story is the body and parent_narrative the message it answers. The message profile is the one definition, with a conformance fixture every reader agrees on.

What every reader does

• Addressed to a Character: its id is in characters, or characters is empty, which means every member.
• The sender is a claim until checked. narrator is what a message claims; the element’s created_by is what the server recorded. The sender is verified when the Character of that membership on the members list is the narrator (created_by null is the owner); otherwise it is a mismatch or unverifiable, and a reader says so rather than showing the name plainly. A message with no narrator is from nobody, not to everyone.
• What a reader has read is a Relation with supertype Read, actor the reader’s Character and the ids read in narratives, counted only when the reader’s own hand wrote it, and no other hand has changed it since (its changed_by is its created_by).
• Unread for a Character is the messages addressed to it, less the ids on its read mark and less its own messages. Read from the API, a message is its own only when the sender is verified, so one that merely claims to be from it still shows as unread; in a folder, where nothing records who wrote what, the narrator is trusted.
• A list trimmed for its reader. A key that may not see every Character is served a message with those ids left out, and x_served_trimmed names the field that lost one. An empty characters with that mark is to someone the reader cannot see, never to everyone, and a missing narrator with it is a sender the reader cannot see, never “from nobody”. A request with no key gets no mark, so it never reads an empty list as “to everyone”.
• An edit is a later hand. When a message’s changed_by is not its created_by, a reader says who edited it; the sender’s answer stays the same.
• A message stays a Narrative. In an element list, a story’s context or a Character’s knowledge it reads like any other; an inbox or a thread reads it by these rules too.
• A Note is not a message. A Narrative with supertype Note is a member’s own line in the world: addressed to nobody, never unread, never in an inbox or a thread. A Character’s line is its newest Note in its own hand that is neither hidden nor proposed.

The TypeScript and Python SDKs carry the readers (isMessage, isAddressedTo, isToEveryone, hasUnseenRecipients, senderStatus, readMarkOf, unreadFor, threadOf, editedBy, isNote, noteOf, and their snake-case twins).

On onlyworlds.com

• An inbox is not only a filtered read: GET /api/v2/narrative/?supertype=Message&characters=<character-id> misses the messages sent to everyone, so read the Messages and filter by the rule.
• Writing a trimmed list back. A write carrying the x_served_trimmed mark is refused (served_trimmed_not_writable); a trimmed list written back without it loses nobody.