Languages and time
The two languages a binding can select, the two that are present but refused, how times are shown, and the one line you write yourself.
Language and time are properties of the destination, not of the fleet. Two teams reading two different conversations can read them in two different languages and two different timezones, from the same events.
Two languages you can select, and two you cannot
| Code | Language | Can a binding select it |
|---|---|---|
en | English | yes |
pl | polski | yes |
ar | العربية | ⛔ no — draft |
th | ไทย | ⛔ no — draft |
Set the one you want on the binding:
A binding that names a draft catalogue is refused. The refusal happens where you set it, not at delivery time.
⚠ Read the last column as the whole answer. ar and th are present in the product —
they exist, they are being worked on, and ar is a right-to-left language, which is a
rendering property the product will have to carry when they are released. None of that makes
them selectable today, and a plan is not a shipped language. Two are released. Two are not.
The reason the draft ones are refused rather than allowed with a warning: a catalogue that is partly written renders a message that is partly in the language you chose and partly not, and the reader has no way to tell which half is the product's intention and which half is an unfinished translation. A notice in English is at least unambiguously in English.
What a catalogue holds
A catalogue holds the wording of a message in one language: the headline, the field labels, and the closing sentence that tells the reader what is now expected of them. A released catalogue carries that wording for every type in the table on What goes out; a draft one does not, and that incompleteness is the entire reason a binding cannot select a draft.
⚠ This page states no count of a catalogue's entries, deliberately. It carried one until 2026-09-08 — a bold number, with a second bolded sentence defending it against a reader who counted one more — and nothing in the product's own checks could measure it. That number was also written while this section believed the fleet announced fewer kinds of event than it does. A hand-maintained cardinal over the product's own data is the exact claim What goes out has stopped making, one page over, and this page has no better instrument than that one had. If you need to compare two catalogues, compare the messages you receive in each.
Time: where a notice carries one, UTC and local together
notice.binding.<name>.timezone sets the local timezone for that binding:
A time in a notice is shown in UTC and in that local zone, together. Not one or the other, and not one configurable instead of the other — both, wherever a time appears.
A third expression stands in front of that pair, and this key does not govern it. A
notice also says how long ago the event happened, in words — 11 min ago — before the two
clocks. It is not a timezone rendering, so this key does nothing to it, and no key on this
page turns it off; it is there so a reader knows whether the thing in front of them is minutes
old or a day old without doing arithmetic.
⚠ So "both" describes the pair of clocks, not the whole of the time on a notice.
⚠ A time is not on every notice. Every type in the table on
What goes out carries the moment the event happened
except delivery.failed, which declares no time field at all and prints no clock — so a
plan to correlate a delivery failure by its timestamp is a plan built on something the product
does not do. This key governs how a time is rendered where there is one — it does not put
one on a notice that has none.
The reasons the pair is rendered rather than one of them:
- UTC is the record's time. It is what the fleet stored, what an audit reads back, and it does not move twice a year. Someone comparing a notice against the record needs the notice to carry the same clock the record does.
- Local is the reader's time. It is what tells a person on a Tuesday evening whether the thing that is waiting has been waiting ten minutes or since yesterday.
Showing one and letting the reader convert is where mistakes come from: a reader who converts in their head does it wrong at least once, and an auditor handed local times has to know where each reader was sitting before the timestamps mean anything. Carrying both costs a few characters and removes the question.
Your own line, and the rules it must obey
A binding can carry a line of your own — the sentence your readers see under a notice, telling
them what this conversation is. That key is note:
⚠ The neighbouring key is not a second sentence. notice.binding.<name>.no_reply_line
is a switch: set it to true and the product adds its own line saying the conversation
does not accept replies. You do not write that line's words, and writing a sentence into that
key is not how you get one:
So: one key you fill in, one key you turn on. The five rules below are the rules of the one you fill in.
Five rules, and each of them is a refusal:
| The rule | Why it is a rule |
|---|---|
| One line | It is a line on a message, not a paragraph in it. |
| At most 200 characters | ⛔ An over-long line is refused, never truncated. A truncated line is a sentence you did not write, appearing under your name, ending mid-word — and you would never see it, because you are not the one reading the notice. |
| No line break | Same rule as the first, stated as the character that breaks it. |
No { or } | Braces are meaningful in the rendering path; a line carrying them is refused rather than rendered as something you did not intend. |
| No control character | An invisible character in a line you cannot see the rendering of is a defect nobody can debug from the reading end. |
The rule that matters most is the second one, and it is the one to read twice: the line is refused, never repaired. Nothing shortens it for you, nothing strips a character to make it fit. A line that is wrong is a line you are told about while you are still looking at it — which is the only moment anyone is looking at it, since the people who read the notices are not the people who set the key.