Homeservers should announce MOTD, canonical name, human name, version, etc... (SYN-1)

[matrixbot]

It'd be nice for homeservers to have as much personality as possible, so when you log onto a given one with a given client you get some kind of message of the day, or perhaps a nickname for the server, or image/HTML or something to characterise the server you're logging into.

(Imported from https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SYN-1)

(Reported by @ara4n)

[matrixbot]

Jira watchers: @erikjohnston @kegsay @ara4n

[matrixbot]

Links exported from Jira:

is blocked by SPEC-161

[matrixbot]

Increasing the priority on this as it's getting really confusing tracking which homeservers my various clients connect to.

-- @ara4n

[matrixbot]

Announcing the version would be particularly useful, to check whether a bug is due to a server being too old for a client or vice versa.

-- @ara4n

[matrixbot]

...and we need to actually announce the canonical hostname of the server, rather than guessing it from the C-S API url

...and it'd be good to announce config data like maximum content upload size limit.

-- @ara4n

[matrixbot]

This surely falls under the remit of CS v2 capabilities API? https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/master/drafts/general_api.rst#capabilities-api-ongoing

-- @kegsay

[matrixbot]

There are a few separate classes of things we might wish to return to the client:

1. Is it static or changes often, e.g. server name vs. message of the day.
2. Is it for internal usage or for human consumption, e.g. turn uris vs message of the day.
3. Is it something immediately required by the client to work, or can it be fetched after client startup.

It may be worth having multiple APIs for distributing this data, e.g. required static information gets sent once on login, whereas optional, dynamic data like MotD could be a separate API.

-- @erikjohnston

[ara4n]

...and email address of the admin so we know who to mail when their federation is screwed.

[richvdh]

Now that we have server notices, perhaps this could be implemented using that.