CAP Alert Bots
Bots relaying Common Alerting Protocol warnings from MetService, Civil Defence and other official sources onto the NZ mesh.
CAP bots relay official warnings onto the mesh - severe weather from MetService, Civil Defence emergency alerts, and similar sources. Common Alerting Protocol is the open standard those agencies already publish in, so a bot can consume the feed directly rather than scraping a website.
A CAP bot speaks without being asked, which is fine so long as it does it somewhere that asked for it - an alert is worth nothing after the event. It is not a free pass on airtime.
Where they belong
Section titled “Where they belong”A dedicated channel, to be decided. Several channels already carry overlapping traffic - #alerts, #weather, #quakealerts, and regional ones like #wlg-weather - so part of the decision is whether CAP alerts fold into those or get their own. See Channels.
Not the Public channel.
Guidelines
Section titled “Guidelines”- Official sources only. A CAP bot relays what an agency published. It does not editorialise, summarise loosely, or forward things it read somewhere else.
- Alerts only, never a feed. Warnings and emergencies, not routine forecasts. If it goes out several times a day, it’s a feed and it belongs on a regional weather channel.
- One message per alert. Short enough to arrive in one packet. Where it is, what it is, how bad, when.
- No repeats. Re-sending the same alert doubles the cost and teaches people to ignore it. Send updates only when the alert itself changes.
- Keep it local. A Northland flood warning has no business waking up Invercargill. MeshCore regions would be the natural way to scope this, but NZ isn’t using them yet - so for now the only lever is the channel. A regional alert belongs on a regional channel, not a national one.
- One bot per source, per region. Two bots on the same MetService feed means every warning goes out twice.
The rules for every bot apply here too.