meshbay.git/docs/captcha.md, branch 0.15

docs: remove the documents MESHBAY_DESIGN.md replaces

2026-09-10T22:19:06Z

Twenty-four files, about 17 000 lines: the two architecture drafts, the three security reviews, eleven design notes, the roadmap, the decisions file, the v1–v4 archive, the deprecated user guide and the stale quickstart. Their content is in MESHBAY_DESIGN.md, and git history holds the originals. The reason to delete rather than keep bannered: a document that is superseded but present still gets read, and a reader cannot always tell which of two accounts of one mechanism is the live one. That was the argument for retiring the user guide rather than repairing it, and it applies to the whole set. What made this safe is the concordance. Roughly 290 comments and docstrings cite these files by section — `musicbay.md §6`, `mediacenter.md §5.5`, `draft-v6 §2.11` — and section 16 maps every one onto its replacement, so not a single comment needs editing to stay followable. It now says plainly that the files are gone and where to recover them, and it gained rows for the three reviews (their findings are section 13), and for the two guides. Four kept documents pointed into the set and were repointed first: `playlists.md` (nine references — it is a live proposal and must not dangle), `WINDOWS-PORT.md`, and CLAUDE.md's example. No dangling reference remains outside section 16. Two files were dropped from the list after checking what they hold. `HTTPS.md` is an operational runbook — Caddy, certificate renewal, DNS, troubleshooting — and MESHBAY_DESIGN.md deliberately covers no operations, so nothing would replace it; the versioned Caddyfile is the config, not the procedure. `cast-smart-tv.md` is the plan for the unbuilt DLNA phase of a feature whose first two phases ship, and section 11.4 summarises it in four lines rather than carrying the SSDP/UPnP work. There is no user guide now, and section 0.1 says so rather than leaving a reader to discover it. Suites green: 2258 passed, 4 skipped. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YVoHVCcfBqud6ZjG4db3y7

docs: point the superseded drafts at the design document

2026-09-10T16:45:03Z

Twenty-three documents that MESHBAY_DESIGN.md absorbs gain a header saying so and naming the sections their content went to. None is deleted: code comments, tests and the documents themselves cite their sections and their labels, and each records reasoning a synthesis compresses. The header states the precedence, because two documents describing one system will disagree eventually: where a draft disagrees with MESHBAY_DESIGN.md the design document is right, and where either disagrees with the code the code is. Seven status lines were corrected on the way through, all of them claiming less than the truth. Videos, Music, Photos, partial-read hashing and account recovery were headed "proposal, not implemented" months after they shipped; the desktop client said "nothing here is implemented" with stages A through D running; draft v6 still called itself the current specification. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YVoHVCcfBqud6ZjG4db3y7

fix(hub): a desktop solve reports no hostname at all, not "meshbay"

2026-09-02T09:54:22Z

Registering from the native client failed with `captcha_failed` while the checkbox was green — a worse symptom than the one being fixed, because the widget now looked fine and only the hub's own log said otherwise: captcha solved on an unexpected host ''; allowed: ['localhost', 'meshbay', 'meshbay.org'] The previous commit assumed Google would report the host component of the origin, so `app://meshbay` would come back as `meshbay` and could sit in `allowed_hosts`. It does not. A solve Google cannot attribute to a domain reports an **empty** hostname, and no allowlist entry can match that. An empty entry is not the answer either: a blank in a TOML list is a typo far more often than an intention, and `load_config` drops blanks for that reason — `captcha.allow_unattributed_host` is a named flag instead, so the trade is stated where it is made. What it admits, plainly: every non-web client, not only ours. A file:// page or somebody else's Electron application look identical from here. That is the same bar the client's own origin would have been — main.js already records that `app://meshbay` is not a credential — and it is a bar: the captcha still has to be solved, per token, in something that can render it. What is given up is the origin restriction for non-web clients, not the captcha. Off by default, and a hub without the desktop client should leave it off. The refusal now names which of the two it is, since they need different answers: an unexpected host names the host, an unattributed one says to set the flag. docs/captcha.md §6 said `meshbay` was the value and told operators to add it; it now records what was measured and why the guess was wrong. The packaged example config carries the flag with the same warning. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014UtzVrzM7e2tG9fSpkR9ML

fix(hub): check the captcha's origin here, so the desktop client can pass one

2026-09-02T08:35:17Z

Reported from the native client: the reCAPTCHA box renders "ERROR for site owner: Invalid domain for site key". The web browser is fine. It is not a client restriction, and the CSP was never what refused — the script loads, which is why the widget appears at all to say so. reCAPTCHA validates the hostname of the page the widget is rendered in against the domain list on the site key, and the desktop client's interface ships inside the package and is served from `app://meshbay` (main.js: `win.loadURL`). Not a preference: file:// breaks ES modules and IndexedDB, and the hub must never become the document origin. So the hostname Google sees is `meshbay`, it is not on the key's list, and it never can be — the check runs on Google's servers and nothing client-side reaches it. The fix turns that check off on the key and does it on the hub instead: [captcha] allowed_hosts = ["meshbay.org", "localhost", "meshbay"] `verify_captcha` refuses a solve whose hostname is not in the list. The hostname comes from `siteverify` — what Google observed, not what the caller asserts — so it is a real check against what turning the console setting off opens, which is a bot rendering the public site key on a page of its own. Empty (the default) skips it, so an existing hub upgrades unchanged with reCAPTCHA still doing the origin check. The two settings go together, and docs/captcha.md §6 says so. The `meshbay` entry is the weak one and the doc says that too: any Electron application can claim the same scheme and host, as main.js already records. What it still costs is a captcha solve per token inside a real Chromium instead of a token farmed from any web page. docs/captcha.md §6 replaced. It documented a design that was superseded twice — an `auth_key`-keyed carve-out that turned out to disable the gate for everyone, and "works in the Electron client too, both run Chromium", which is the assumption this bug is made of: reCAPTCHA validates the domain, not the rendering engine. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014UtzVrzM7e2tG9fSpkR9ML

feat(hub): reCAPTCHA v2 on Register and Password Reset pages

2026-09-01T09:06:47Z

Server-side verification module, CaptchaConfig in hub.toml, captcha_site_key exposed via /v1/hub/info, useCaptcha() hook in the SPA with stable DOM rendering (strength bar always present to avoid Preact re-ordering the captcha widget). Native clients (auth_key path) skip captcha. All 10 locales updated. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6