Recent
changes

Where to go next

• Draw your own stamp. A channel's mark can be a picture instead of a coloured box with four letters in it, uploaded under Your own mark in the Stamp section. Two ways to use it, and you pick: the picture as the ground with your letters, the channel name and the date printed over it, or the picture as the whole mark, for a seal that already carries its own words. It shows everywhere your mark does, and a commemorative can carry one too. PNG or GIF, 336 by 224 or 168 by 112, with a template to trace. The template and the rules →
• The embassy office: a mark for a night you spent together. Two channels that hold an accord can strike a commemorative stamp for one collaboration. Design it from a menu or upload one, set the window it can be earned in, and both of you have to agree before it counts: the channel that drafts one cannot agree to its own. Anybody with a passport who is in either chat while you are both on the air carries it afterwards. It is not a port and it moves nobody's rung, because standing is counted from ports and is not for sale. Either of you can withdraw it, which stops it being earned and leaves it with everybody who already has it. Under Embassy in the Port of Entry, and on your holder record.
• A passport can move. Artwork can be a GIF now, so a channel can paint a few frames and have the paper play while the card is on screen, with the fields and the photograph over the top. The back stays still: it is the page you turn to and read, and a GIF cannot be stopped once it is playing.
• The back of your passport takes a picture of its own. Both faces used to wear the front's artwork, which only shows once somebody paints a real design: a front is laid out around the portrait, and an outline drawn to frame one lands across the middle of a face that has no portrait. There is a second row under Artwork for it. Left empty, the back is your paper colour rather than the front's picture.
• The photo frame can be uploaded at last. The Port of Entry has offered a frame upload since frames shipped, and the server only ever accepted paper sizes, so nobody could put one on a shelf. Frames, paper and marks all go through the same door now.
• The Inspection Booth shows the applicant's own passport. It has been drawing a plain card for everybody who ever stood at a desk. The real document was on file every time and was being read as nothing, so the booth took its "no document" path and looked like it was working.
• Your own passport wears your channel's design, wherever you go. A streamer's document used to fall back to whichever channel they were standing in the moment they left home. It follows your Document style now, and follows it as you change it: upload a new picture and you are wearing it everywhere, with nothing to press. There is a switch under Document style, and buying a skin from another channel turns it off for you.
• Passport artwork is the streamer's alone, and belongs to an open port. No viewer can upload a design. Only the broadcaster can, for their own channel, and only while that port is open: streamed in the last 30 days, or registered in the last 30 days if you have not gone live yet. Stop streaming and the upload closes with the port. Nothing you have already uploaded or sold is affected, holders keep wearing what they bought, and one broadcast opens it again.
• A featured port on the front page. One Bureau channel that is live at that moment, playing muted under the headline, picked at random and somebody else on your next visit. When nobody is live there is no band there at all. Discovery belongs on the site, where a visitor came looking for it, rather than in anybody's chat.
• The Bureau of Exchange is open. The rates board: who has travelled furthest, which ports are busiest, and the ladder every holder stands on. Holders appear by name only if they switched their public page on, and even then with a count of ports rather than a list. Nothing on it can be spent. Linked from the bottom of every page.
• Frequent flyer tiers are finished. First flight, frequent flyer at three channels, diplomat at ten, counted across the whole Bureau, so no channel can set them. The rank was already printed on the document; now your holder record and your public page say how many more ports the next rung costs.
• The front page's not-shipped list is empty, and says so.
• Miles. Every holder now has them: 50 for every new port stamped, 10 for every visit, up to 200 a day from visits, counted from the stamps and entries already on file so nobody starts at zero. Earned everywhere, to be spent per channel once channels open their stores. Your balance is on your holder record; the rates are on the Exchange. Nothing about the rung changes: standing is still counted from ports and is not for sale.
• The front page opens with your own strip when you are signed in: your document, your rung, your miles, your stamps, and the doors to your record, the Exchange and your shop. A visitor sees the front page as before.
• Seven more things a shop can sell. Owned once and worn from the holder record: a title of your own wording for the TITLE field, a legend struck into the seal, a signature style (an ink and a flourish), and a photo frame you paint on a second template. Sent for the price each time: one of your saved scenes on air for a while and then back, and a line the sender writes, on screen for a few seconds. And a lottery ticket, while a lottery is open.
• The Lottery. One giveaway. Open it under Lottery in the Port of Entry with a prize; anyone with a passport enters by typing !lottery, once, for nothing; a shop ticket adds weight. The draw is weighted by the stamps each holder carries, so the traveller has the best odds and the first-timer still has a chance. The winner lands on your stream and in chat.
• The Ledger. Your channel's own report, from the front page strip: arrivals per broadcast, first-time against returning, visas in the last thirty days, and where your holders went next. Counts of holders, never names, held to the same threshold as the overlap report.
• Sounds and pictures, sent from the shop. Two more things a Duty Free can sell: a clip you upload, played on your stream, and one of your stage pictures, put on your stream for a few seconds with the sender's name under it. Sent for the price each time rather than owned, only while you are live, at most as often as you say per item and as many times per holder per stream as you say. The bot can say who sent it in chat, or not, per item.
• Paint your own passport. A template you fill in Photoshop or GIMP and upload under Document style, as the paper of your document and of any skin you sell. Colour, typeface, seal and script are still yours to pick on top of it; the ornament, the motion and the header's ground are held off while a picture is on, so nothing paints over your work. PNG, 1120 by 680. The template and the rules →
• The Duty Free. Every channel has a shop at bureauofchat.com/store/yourchannel, empty until you put something on it. A skin is your saved document style frozen as it is, priced in miles or free from a rung on the ladder, or both; a holder who buys it wears it in every channel, from their record or from the shop. Bought on the site, never in chat. Under Duty Free in the Port of Entry.
• Your own commands and timed messages, under a new section of the Port of Entry. Write !discord and its reply and the bot answers it; write a line and an interval and the bot posts it while you are live, once chat has said enough since the last one. Entirely optional: both lists are empty until you write into them, and a channel that writes nothing has the bot exactly as it was. The Bureau's own commands cannot be redefined.
• Nothing in your chat names another stream unless you ask for it. !ports can name the Bureau channels streaming at that moment, and the bot can say how many are open after a passport lands, at most once a quarter of an hour. Both are off, for every channel, behind one switch under On the stream in the Port of Entry. A bot naming another live channel in your chat is advertising somebody else's stream in your room, and that is yours to allow rather than ours to assume. The board of open ports is on the site either way.
• Still to visit now says who is live. On your holder record, the ports streaming right now come first and are marked, and the count says how many.
• A public passport page lists the ports open right now under the document, with a tick on the ones that passport already holds. That page is the one people post, so it is the one a stranger lands on.

The Bureau, lit from behind

• The site has been refitted. Glass panels, a brighter teal, light on the type and a faint grid behind it. Nothing you had set up has moved: every setting, stamp, document and placement is where you left it. Only the dressing changed.
• The Telestrator and the Inspection Booth stay solid. Glass looks good on a page you are reading and gets in the way on a desk you are working at, so those two keep flat panels. Reported from a live stream, which is the only place it shows.
• What your viewers see on your stream is untouched. The overlay does not share a stylesheet with the site and never did, so your passports, boards and documents look precisely as they did yesterday. This is the website and the control room only.
• There is a plain mode, at the bottom of any page, and in the OBS dock beside your channel name. It turns off the glass, the glow and the moving layers for a machine that is already running a game, an encoder and a broadcast. Colours, type and layout stay put; it is the same product with the lights up. The setting is remembered per browser, and the dock and the site share it.
• Anything that moves also stops on its own for anybody whose system asks for reduced motion, without touching the switch.
• The Office of Embassies has come off the not-shipped list on the front page, a day after it shipped. That list is there so nobody has to guess what exists, which only works if it is true.
• Accords no longer carry a width. A friend's stream arrives at the usual size and you drag it, or recall a saved scene. Nothing arrives live, so there was never a wrong size to guard against, and a scene already remembers a whole layout. Sound is still set per accord, and still off unless you turn it on.
• The writing is shorter. The handbook, the Port of Entry, the front page, the signup form and the chat command reference all said things twice and explained themselves at length. Same facts, fewer words.

An embassy, and a desk inside OBS

• Two channels can now agree an accord, and put each other's live stream on their own. Ask for one in the Port of Entry, and it starts when they agree; asking somebody who has already asked you is agreeing, so you cannot both end up waiting on each other. From then on the Embassy tab in Dispatch lists who you hold an accord with, marks who is on the air right now, and puts them on your stage in one click. Either of you can end it at any time, alone, without the other's agreement.
• Sound is off unless you turn it on, per accord. The ordinary use of this is a second window showing what a friend is doing in the same game or event with you talking over it; sound is for co-watching and tournaments. If you both turn it on at once your audio goes out, into their stream, and back into yours about twenty seconds later, so it takes two people to arrange, rather than one to discover.
• A stream shown this way is roughly twenty seconds behind what they are actually doing. That is Twitch and no setting fixes it: treat the window as a picture, and talk to each other somewhere else.
• A Twitch channel link now also works anywhere a video link does, so you can put one up without an accord. The accord is what makes it a standing arrangement both of you agreed to.
• A compact desk you can dock inside OBS. Add bureauofchat.com/overlay/dock under Docks → Custom Browser Docks and the queues, the telestrator's on/off switches, the departure board, the Inspection Booth and your activity log sit beside your preview. Waiting passports and visa applications are never behind a tab. It opens on your own channel and offers no way to point it anywhere else, and because OBS keeps its own browser storage it will ask you to sign in once there.

The desk opens

• A raid is now processed at a passport desk. The board says who raided and how many, as it always has. Then, as the people who came with it start talking, the desk draws them up as a queue: a row each, their document number, what they have earned at your port, and a disposition stamp landing one after another down the line. Your country's own words throughout: a returning traveller is PREVIOUSLY INTERRED in Mourning and a RETURNING USER on Bender 98.
• It waits for them to speak because Twitch never says who raided; a raid is a channel and a number. The desk processes the travellers it has actually seen rather than a list somebody guessed at, and if nobody with a passport turns up it says nothing at all.
• What holds somebody at the desk is only ever the Bureau's own paperwork. A traveller is held if they presented a document at your Inspection Booth and it was refused. Their account age, how long they have followed, what they said and another channel's verdict all count for nothing. Being admitted at a later run clears it: the desk remembers the last thing that happened rather than the worst.
• Runs on the raid board's own switch. Nothing to turn on if you already have it.

Arriving from another port

• The arrivals board says which port somebody came in from, and how many they carry. A row used to read 3 DAYS AGO · → NORTHPORT. It now names the port the way that channel names itself, strikes that port's own stamp on the row, and says how many open ports the passport holds: 3 DAYS AGO · → NORTHPORT · 4 PORTS. Two thirds of the passports on file carry stamps from more than one channel, and until now none of that was visible anywhere but the document itself.
• The stamp on the row is the other port's shape and letters in your board's ink, never in their colour. Your arrivals board wears one country's palette, and a colour chosen for somebody else's board can land invisible on yours.
• A port that has closed is no longer named. Where somebody travelled from was read from every sighting on record, which outlives a channel going dark or leaving entirely, so a board could point a live audience at a door that shut a year ago. It now uses the same rule as the ports list: streamed in the last 30 days, or it is not a port.
• One number and one origin, never a list. What the board can say about a holder is where they last came in from and how many stamps are in the book, and never the channels they watch.

Keyboard on the desk, and four fixes at the booth

• Delete, copy and paste in the Telestrator. Delete removes what is selected, Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V copy and paste, Ctrl+X cuts and Ctrl+D duplicates. Pasted copies arrive parked, and each paste is offset from the last. None of it fires while you are typing in a caption.
• A smoothing slider beside Grid and Safe area: how closely a dragged element follows the pointer. Off by default, and a smoothed drag still lands exactly where you let go.
• One presentation each per run at the Inspection Booth. Being stamped closes the desk to you until the next run, so a booth is not won by whoever refreshes fastest. Queueing through a booth that closed does not count; only being seen does.
• The verdict now plays on your own preview in Port Authority. Stamping used to empty the panel in front of you while the stamp was still on the stream.
• Hats sit on top of the head rather than across the face. Headwear was being drawn over the photograph and then cropped to the circle, which made a top hat a black rectangle on somebody's forehead.
• The standing Present your !passport line no longer appears in the booth preview, because that preview is your desk rather than your chat.
• The shoutout clip obeys its size again. The size floor existed because Twitch's own player refuses to start when it is drawn small, but it was applied to every clip window including the one in the placement editor, so dragging the slider below 1× did nothing. Thirty days of shoutouts: 125 clips, every one of them played as a file in our own player. The floor now sits on the fallback alone, and the note beside the slider says what happens to that rare clip.
• The Inspection Booth is set up where you run it. Switching it on, applicants per run, extra rules per run and whether the person at the desk may talk have all moved from the Port of Entry onto the booth's own panel in Port Authority. The tab is always there now; it used to appear only once the booth was on, which made the switch the one thing you could not reach.
• Manager. A second permission, ticked per person beside their name in Dispatch access. Everybody on that list can work the live desk; a manager can also open your Port of Entry and change how your channel is set up. Anything they change is written into your activity log under their name. What a manager can never touch is the list itself: they cannot add anyone, remove anyone, or promote themselves.
• Four more stamp shapes. Alongside square and circle: lozenge, shield, leaf and arch. Each button in the Port of Entry wears the shape it names, and the shape follows your mark everywhere it lands: the visa page, a holder's collection, and the wall of ports they have not visited yet.

The Inspection Booth

• The Inspection Booth. A document check played against your chat. A viewer opens the link the bot posts, is shown the record the Bureau holds on them, and decides how much of it to lie about. They queue; you call them to the desk one at a time and stamp ADMITTED or REFUSED against a rule board that changes every run. The run scores itself at the end.
• The booth page tells a forger what their lie is worth before they hand it over: amber for a field you altered, red for one an inspector should catch you on.
• The details always have to match: the name, the document number, the issuing state and the issue date. Those four stopped being random draws, so misspelling your own name matters every run rather than on the days the board happened to ask.
• The passport seal has gone. It was a colour the Bureau invented and printed nowhere on the passport, so nobody could check it by looking.
• Bender 98, a fortieth country. Teal desktop, blue title bar, hot pink accent, Silkscreen throughout; the board repaints itself the way a 98-era window redraws a dirty region. Stamps read LOGGED ON, and a flagged arrival is an ILLEGAL OPERATION. A whole bureau, so it dresses the passport, both boards and the booth from one setting.
• Standing counts the crossings, not just the years. Entries are counted per broadcast, so resident and citizen can be set in streams attended. Return streaks and anniversaries print on the document.

The marks the telestrator was missing

Arrows, circles, boxes and a spotlight that darkens everything outside it, each drawn with the same drag and each carrying an outline so a pale line survives a bright game. A video link can now be scrubbed from a silent copy at the desk rather than by watching your own stream back, and GIFs are searched in the rail instead of in another tab.

A board of your own, and the sound of paper

• A board is now six named parts and three colours, chosen the way the passport is, and it can be cut from your own document's palette. Boards used to be whole countries, so a channel that had built its own document had no board to match and fell back to Republic of Chat's.
• Three quarters of a second of paper under every document !passport puts up. Off unless a channel asks for it: this is audio on somebody's broadcast, and nothing here starts making a noise because a new version shipped.

Your own bot, and a switch for everything

• Speak through your own bot. Connect one of yours and everything the Bureau says in your chat goes out as that account instead: same commands, same words, one bot in your mod list rather than a fourth.
• A switch for everything that reaches a stream. A shoutout was three behaviours behind one command (a board, a line in chat, and Twitch's own shoutout) and none could be turned off separately. Each can now, and so can the countdown and the passport itself.
• Republic of Dart, the thirty-ninth country: dark green paper, cream ink, acid green accent, a stencil header band and a hex seal struck ENLISTED.

Clips with sound, and a colour keyer

Shoutout clips are played by the overlay itself rather than handed to Twitch's player, which is what finally got them audible on a Browser Source. Separately, anything placed on the stream (an uploaded image, a clip) can have a colour keyed out of it.

Thirty-eight countries, and visas that answer back

• The passport and the departure board went from fourteen bureaux to thirty-eight, each with its own palette, typefaces, native title and status words. Jade Republic was retired and the channels on it moved to Moonlit Warren.
• Visas answer back. A document announced itself arriving and then went quiet about the decision, so a viewer watching chat never learned whether they were let in. Purposes can be filed in the applicant's own words, filings queue on the arrivals board until answered, and a channel can let them through automatically.
• The stamp collection gets a page to turn to: eight times the room, each stamp with the channel that issued it and the date it was first struck. The document turns to it partway through its time on screen.

One design language, and the nine-slot passport

• The site rebuilt to one design system, one passport instead of three, and every typeface served from here rather than from Google. Nothing a viewer loads comes from a third party any more.
• The nine-slot passport: paper, ink and accent, then a typeface, a script, a header treatment, an ornament, a seal with a legend, a motion and a footer. Countries are named points in that space rather than fixed designs, so a holder can walk away from a preset in any direction.
• The departure board rebuilt as thirteen bureaux, each with its own ornament strip, display and script faces, native title, status words and its own way of turning a value over. Split-flap became one mechanic of thirteen.
• A stamp struck harder the longer somebody has been coming. Visitor, resident and citizen land differently on the page, so the one thing a passport is for is legible without reading the words.

Port Authority

• Port Authority. Register, Transportation and Dispatch were three doors into the same job, named after the Bureau's org chart rather than after what a streamer came to do. There is one now: where a channel is run from while it is live, with the settings behind it as the Port of Entry.
• The telestrator desk, and video on the stream: two lists, a canvas and a rail (what can be added, what is on the stream, what is parked) and a fifth kind of thing to place, a YouTube link played in the overlay with sound.
• The Port of Entry rebuilt as a desk: sections down one side, the controls in the middle, and a live preview of your own overlay on the right. It used to be one long column that never said where you were or what was unsaved.
• The overlay itself runs the front page. The reel under the hero is the overlay's own code driven by a script, rather than a recording or a mockup.
• The browser extension retired. Sightings are read from the badges on chat messages, which left it nothing to do; it is gone and so are the permissions it asked for. Nothing needs installing to hold a passport.

The Bureau of Chat

• The Bureau of Chat, and the Department of Citizenship. Every browser-facing page rebuilt to one design, and a holder record behind it: sign in, see your own passport drawn by the real overlay code, and set the parts of it that are yours. The stamp stays the streamer's, because it lands on their broadcast.
• A control room, and things placed on the stream. Text and images composed on a scale model of your Browser Source, so what is arranged in the panel is what lands on the stream at any resolution. Mods you name can work it alongside you, an explicit list you keep, because being trusted to time somebody out is not the same as being trusted to put things on the stream.
• The departure board, and a raid with a ceremony at both ends. One board with four faces: chat picking where to go, the vote closed and a destination won, a raid leaving, a raid arriving.
• The arrivals board. Who just walked into chat, where they last travelled from, and how long since they were last here. Ambient rather than interruptive: it makes a quiet chat look inhabited.
• Standing: visitor, resident, citizen. The first thing here that rewards time rather than money, with the thresholds belonging to the channel, so a year-old channel and a month-old one can both mean something by resident.
• Where your regulars also go. Nothing else on Twitch can answer this, because analytics see one channel and the Bureau sees across them. Counts only, never names, and a channel is left off entirely until at least three of your regulars have turned up there.
• Form BC-7, the visa application. !visa puts an application in front of the streamer, one open form per person, amended rather than stacked if filed again. A decided form cannot be decided twice.
• The operator's handbook, and !help. Fourteen chat commands existed and nothing announced any of them, so for anyone but the author they did not exist.

Passports of your own, in public

• Every channel became its own country: styles, colour overrides, typeface pairings, a choice of which documents appear at all, and a drag-to-place editor for every element the overlay draws, positioned and scaled per channel instead of pinned to a hardcoded corner. Until this, every channel drew the same olive passport.
• Public passport pages. A holder can publish theirs at bureauofchat.com/p/<name> and link it wherever they like. Off until they switch it on, and off again the moment they say so; while it is off we answer for that name exactly as we answer for a name we have never seen.
• Postcards in the departure reel. Each departing viewer's own line from earlier in the stream surfaces beside their name in the !deboard credits reel. It costs no storage: the line is held for the stream and dropped with it.