On a fresh install the dashboard was about fifteen identical "No data." boxes and empty donut rings, which read as broken at exactly the moment an operator wants to know the new bot is working. Real-time said "Nothing heard yet" forever, with no sense of whether the silence was normal.
Until the snapshot has seen any node or packet, the dashboard now shows one panel in place of the grid:
- What the station is doing, from the same verdict as the strip: listening, starting, not running (start the bot), or the radio problem in the way.
- What fills in first: nodes from adverts, then paths and hop counts, then one-hop neighbors.
- That timing depends on the mesh.
- For admins, buttons to watch Real-time and check the radio settings; both pages are admin-only, so anonymous visitors get the panel without them.
The grid comes back on its own once anything is heard.
Real-time's empty tape now says "Listening since 2:28 PM (12 min) · nothing heard yet", counting each second from the bot's start time, which /api/banner-status now reports while the bot runs. After ten minutes with nothing, it adds one line of diagnosis: that can be normal on a quiet mesh, otherwise check the frequency and preset in Radio settings, or the Logs. When the bot isn't running or the radio can't receive, it says that instead.
agessaman
732ac72b76