v24.10.12 - Better name discovery, MQTT and UI improvements ✨

Hey everyone 👋

This release contains stability improvements, bug fixes and a couple of new features. There is a new plugin for better device name resolution (AVAHISCAN) that helps getting more accurate device names especially for Apple devices. Thanks @stanelie for testing and the patience 🙂

Contributors helped me make the MQTT plugin better to support EMQX and to display time values in the Home Assistant attributes better. Thanks to @ingoratsdorf , @NightMean , @Jozko568 🙏

There are a couple of UI improvements in the Settings section on mobile, easier selection of Plugins, separately showing offline and down devices in the presence chart.

I've updated a few docs and also written up how to improve the performance on how to keep the app chugging along without issues 🚂

As always, thanks to everyone helping with translations (@ytorres, @Noschvie, @mapi68, @YoSafeguard, @gallegonovato), answering discussions (@leiweibau, @FlyingToto), testing (@corasaniti) and contributing (@RincewindX) in any way! 💪

Make sure you refresh your browser cache (usually shift + reload button) - and click the 🔄 refresh button in the top right corner.

🏘️ Community

• Big thanks to @corasaniti for testing the dev branch 🙏

📚Docs updates

• How to improve the performance 🆕
• Improvement to the developer environment setup docs ✨
• Improving the clarity of the Subnets docs ✨

⚙Settings

• MQTT_topic_root allowing to specify a custom topic, e.g. netalertx instead of the default system-sensors ✨
• NEWDEV_ignored_IPs and NEWDEV_ignored_MACs where not applied on new device discovery #836

🔌Plugins

• AVAHISCAN for mDNS device name lookup to retrieve better names especially for Apple devices #815 🆕
• MQTT improvements to support EMQX by @ingoratsdorf ✨
• MQTT improvements by @NightMean and @Jozko568, such as better diacritics support ✨
• UNIFIMP didn't handle new devices correctly if a port value was passed to the app #833 ✨
• UNIFIMP is now normalizing strings so that diacritics are normalized and not skipped caméra -> camera ✨
• MIKROTIK didn't pass IPs correctly, so they were missing in the devices tables #835 ✨

🖼 UI

• CSV export didn't handle quotes and new lines in the comments field #808 ✨
• Presence over time chart shows Down devices separately from Offline devices #816 🆕
• Settings Mobile UI improvements to show description in pop-up and full-width input area ✨
• Gradual replacement of the click+select setting component with a drop-down and pill component 🆕
• Removal of DB backup functionality (usually handled externally) in the Maintenance section for easier code maintenance ✨

🆕 - New features	✨ - Fixes & Improvements	⚠ - Possibly breaking changes	🧪 - Experimental/work in progress

Previous releases:

https://github.com/jokob-sk/NetAlertX/releases

Target release frequency:

• Monthly

What's Changed

• fixes to MQTT publisher by @ingoratsdorf in #810
• Update MQTT to send model as device name by @NightMean in #820
• Update DEBUG_TIPS.md by @RincewindX in #827

New Contributors

• @NightMean made their first contribution in #820
• @RincewindX made their first contribution in #827

Full Changelog: v24.9.26...v24.10.12