in a new timeline entry is announced in the chatroom.  The announcement
appears to come from a user whose name is given by the chat-timeline-user
setting.

This mechanism is similar to [email notification](./alerts.md) except that
the notification is sent via chat instead of via email.

## Quirks

  - There is no message-editing capability. This is by design and
    desire of `/chat`'s developers.

  - When `/chat` has problems connecting to the message poller (see
    the next section) it will provide a subtle visual indicator of the
    connection problem - a dotted line along the top of the input
    field.  If the connection recovers within a short time, that
    indicator will go away, otherwise it will pop up a loud message
    signifying that the connection to the poller is down and how long
    it will wait to retry (progressively longer, up to some
    maximum).  `/chat` will recover automatically when the server is
    reachable.  Trying to send messages while the poller connection is
    down is permitted, and the poller will attempt to recover
    immediately if sending of a message succeeds. That applies to any
    operations which send traffic, e.g. if the per-message "toggle
    text mode" button is activated or a message is globally deleted.

## Implementation Details

*You do not need to understand how Fossil chat works in order to use it.
But many developers prefer to know how their tools work.
This section is provided for the benefit of those curious developers.*