Version 1.6.5 is out, and it is the one I have wanted to build for a while. It is about letting parts of your board have their own message life, instead of the whole system sharing one idea of "where I am reading."

Three things arrived, and they compose.

Point a menu item at a board

Read, Post, and New scan items grew an optional Area field. Set it and that one item acts on that one board, for that press only. The caller's current area does not move, anywhere.

The use I built it for is a game lounge. One menu:

S  Strategy board    read  -> SUZ_STRAT
C  Chronicles        read  -> SUZ_CHRON
P  Post a message    post  -> SUZ_STRAT
D  Play Suzerain     door
Q  Back

Players talk shop without leaving the lounge or losing their place on the rest of the board.

Menus that keep their own current area

Every menu form gained an Area scope field. Leave it blank and nothing changes. Give it a short name and that menu keeps its own current message area, remembered per caller between calls, separate from the board's. Menus sharing a name share the area.

A language-split board finally reads like one. A German section and an English section, each with its own boards and its own sense of where you were, while the stock message menu carries on untouched.

Areas that step out of the list

A new Listed checkbox, checked by default. Uncheck it and the area leaves the general area-change list, and changes nothing else. It still counts, still opens from any menu item that names it, still reports to the global new scan.

Unlisted is discovery, not security. A public-but-unlisted lounge will announce itself in a caller's new scan. If you want a section genuinely private, gate it with Read ACS.

Also in this release

Two new module keys, setarea and setareaback, let a menu select the current area directly, so you can build your own area picker in ANSI and replace the system one. An Area change item can be limited to a single category. And every public chat line in the console now has a delete link, with an audit line recording who said what.

If you are already running a board

Overlay-upload and the first page hit does the rest. Nothing is copied or migrated: a board that never opens the new fields runs byte identically to 1.6.1. Every new field ships blank, and blank means exactly the board you already run.

Download 1.6.5 · Full release notes · The manual

ATDT is a bulletin board system that runs on ordinary shared hosting. PHP 8.1 and a folder you can write to, no daemon and no build step. Free and MIT licensed. There is a demo board if you would rather poke at one than read about it.