News that finds you, including when nothing of ours is open

The dots covered Reports and Messages from the day those sections existed. The
announcement did not: only a chat reply produced an HX-Trigger, so a scheduled
run that filed a report or posted into Messages lit a green dot in a corner and
said nothing at all. That is precisely the arrival nobody is watching for -- a
chat reply is one you asked for a moment ago and are probably looking at.

So every kind announces, each with its own once-only flag, and the payload is a
list of items rather than of titles, because a notification is a thing you click
and a title cannot say where.

One arrival, three channels, and they must not all fire. A toast for somebody
looking at the page; a count in the tab title while it is hidden, cleared on
focus; a system notification for somebody elsewhere entirely. The service worker
is the only place that can tell them apart -- the server cannot see whether a
window is focused and the page cannot see a push it did not receive -- so it
stays quiet when one of its own windows has focus.

And web push, hand-rolled against RFC 8291 and RFC 8292 with the cryptography
already here for Fernet. It exists because everything else is polled by an open
page, and the arrival worth interrupting somebody for is a schedule firing at
seven in the morning with the laptop shut.

The trade is real and is written down rather than glossed: the POST goes to
Google's or Mozilla's push service, the payload is sealed end to end so they
cannot read it, and what they do learn is that this server sent something and
when. Opt-in per device, off until asked for, and the rest of the system works
without it. Nothing else in LLeMbas contacts an outside service on its own.

The encryption is tested by decrypting it back with an independent
implementation of the specification's other half. There is no other way to know:
a push service accepts the POST and forwards bytes it cannot read, so a wrong
derivation is a notification that never appears, with a 201 in the log.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

src/lembas/api/chats.py

@@ -722,7 +722,7 @@ async def keep_chat(db: Db, user: RequiredUser, chat_id: str) -> Response:
 
 @router.get("/unread")
 async def unread_poll(db: Db, user: RequiredUser) -> Response:
-    """Dots for the sidebar, and a toast for anything newly arrived.
+    """Dots for the sidebar, and an announcement for anything newly arrived.
 
     Polled rather than pushed: a browser sitting on a different chat has no
     open connection to the one that finished, and a second always-on channel
@@ -730,6 +730,19 @@ async def unread_poll(db: Db, user: RequiredUser) -> Response:
 
     Returns out-of-band spans so only the dots change -- re-rendering the whole
     sidebar would reset the folder open/closed state on every tick.
+
+    **Everything that can arrive is announced, not only chats.** The dots have
+    covered Reports and Messages since those sections existed, but the
+    announcement did not: only a chat reply produced an `HX-Trigger`, so a
+    scheduled run that filed a report or posted into Messages lit a dot in the
+    corner and said nothing at all. That is precisely the arrival nobody is
+    watching for -- a chat reply is one you asked for a moment ago and are
+    probably looking at, while a schedule fires while you are elsewhere. So each
+    kind carries its own `*_notified` flag and each announces once.
+
+    The payload is a list of items rather than a list of titles, because the
+    browser notification wants somewhere to go when it is clicked and a title on
+    its own cannot say where.
     """
     chats = list(
         db.scalars(
@@ -749,11 +762,15 @@ async def unread_poll(db: Db, user: RequiredUser) -> Response:
         )
     )
 
+    # What to announce, in the order it will be read out. Each entry carries
+    # where it came from and where to go, because a browser notification is a
+    # thing you click.
+    items: list[dict[str, str]] = []
+
     fresh = [c for c in chats if c.unread and not c.unread_notified]
     for chat in fresh:
         chat.unread_notified = True
-    if fresh:
-        db.commit()
+        items.append({"kind": "chat", "title": chat.title, "url": f"/chat/{chat.id}"})
 
     markup = "".join(
         f'<span id="unread-{c.id}" class="unread-dot" hx-swap-oob="true"'
@@ -771,6 +788,14 @@ async def unread_poll(db: Db, user: RequiredUser) -> Response:
             '<span id="unread-reports" class="unread-dot" hx-swap-oob="true"'
             f'{"" if waiting else " hidden"} title="New reports"></span>'
         )
+        # Announced per report rather than per section, because the title is the
+        # whole of what makes it worth interrupting somebody for -- "a report
+        # arrived" is a sentence they have to go and act on to understand.
+        for report in reports_service.unannounced(db, user):
+            report.unread_notified = True
+            items.append(
+                {"kind": "report", "title": report.title, "url": f"/reports/{report.id}"}
+            )
 
     # The Messages conversation, read from the row rather than created: this
     # runs every ten seconds on every open page, and `for_user` would write one
@@ -783,13 +808,21 @@ async def unread_poll(db: Db, user: RequiredUser) -> Response:
         f'{"" if (conversation and conversation.unread) else " hidden"}'
         ' title="New messages"></span>'
     )
+    if conversation is not None and conversation.unread and not conversation.unread_notified:
+        conversation.unread_notified = True
+        # Not the conversation's title, which is "Messages" and says nothing.
+        # There is one per person and it is the section, so the section is the
+        # honest name for it.
+        items.append({"kind": "message", "title": "Messages", "url": "/messages"})
+
+    if items:
+        db.commit()
 
     response = HTMLResponse(markup)
-    if fresh:
-        # HX-Trigger carries the toast; ui.js listens for it.
-        response.headers["HX-Trigger"] = json.dumps(
-            {"lembas:unread": {"titles": [c.title for c in fresh]}}
-        )
+    if items:
+        # HX-Trigger carries it; ui.js turns it into a toast, a browser
+        # notification and a count in the tab title.
+        response.headers["HX-Trigger"] = json.dumps({"lembas:unread": {"items": items}})
     return response