The signed-in header carries a ✨ What's New entry, left of the avatar and next to the chat toggle, on desktop and on mobile. It opens the newest release-notes page, the map of what the latest release brought, and that page links the day-by-day What's New feed under Settings. The avatar menu keeps its own What's New entry, which opens that feed directly. Anonymous visitors do not get the entry: their header is the public storefront. Policy whats-new-header.

Which page it opens

Release notes are written per release (policy whatsnew-cadence), one page per version under Doc/ReleaseNotes, named by the version with underscores: 3_0_0, 3_1_0. The entry lists that namespace's children and opens the one with the highest version. It never goes by the order rows arrive in or by string order, so 3_10_0 beats 3_9_0. A page whose name is not a version never wins over one that is. If a release is cut without its page, the entry keeps showing the previous release. That is a release task, described in Release Process §6.

The dot

While you have not opened the newest release, the glyph carries a dot and its tooltip says so. Opening it from the header records the page on your own profile, User.LastSeenReleaseNotes, through GetMeshNodeStream(userPath).Update. The dot then clears in every tab and on every device. Browser storage is never the source of truth for it. When the next release's page is published, its path differs from the one you saw and the dot returns.

Opening the release notes some other way (a link, the documentation tree) does not clear the dot: only the header entry records the visit.

Where the pieces live

Piece Where
Newest-page choice, the seen check, the write WhatsNewRelease in src/MeshWeaver.Graph (core) — NewestPath, IsUnseen, ObserveWhatsNewRelease, MarkReleaseNotesSeen
The per-user field User.LastSeenReleaseNotes (core)
The Blazor header button WhatsNewHeaderButton in MeshWeaver.Plugins src/MeshWeaver.Blazor.Portal
The React header button WhatsNewButton in MeshWeaver.Plugins clients/portal-next
Tooltip text catalog keys header.whatsNew.tooltip and header.whatsNew.unseenTooltip (en and de)

Tests: WhatsNewReleaseTest (test/MeshWeaver.Graph.Test) covers the newest-by-version choice, the link, and the dot clearing once the visit is written.

See also