As MeshCore meshes have grown, so has the noise. To keep a busy area from drowning in re-flooded traffic, MeshCore added the concept of regions (also called scopes) — a way to tag flood traffic so repeaters only forward what's meant for them. MeshMonitor 4.12.0 brings first-class support for regions to the MeshCore experience.

What is a region / scope?

A region is a named tag attached to a flooded packet. MeshCore derives a transport key from the region name and uses it to decide whether a repeater should forward a packet — there's no parent/child hierarchy, just name matching. Operators in dense areas configure their repeaters with region denyf *, which stops forwarding of legacy, unscoped flood packets — so any sender that wants its traffic to propagate must tag it with the right region. (An alternative, flood.max.unscoped, lets a limited number of unscoped packets through instead.)

If you've ever joined a regional MeshCore network — say a "Germany" or a Pacific-Northwest mesh — and found your messages weren't getting anywhere, a missing scope tag is very often why.

The MeshCore project documents all of this in detail:

• Region Filtering — the original explanation of scoped group channels and repeater filtering.
• Default Scope Region — the v1.15 "default scope" for companions and repeaters.
• MeshCore CLI Commands — including region, region denyf, and flood.max.unscoped.
• MeshCore Docs & FAQ — general reference.

What MeshMonitor 4.12.0 adds

Per-channel and per-source scope. Each MeshCore channel can carry a Region/Scope, and each source gets a default scope (meshcoreDefaultScope) in MeshCore Settings. In 4.12.0 the scope is applied to all originated flood traffic — channel messages, DMs, adverts, remote-admin logins, remote telemetry, and remote CLI — so your traffic actually propagates on a denyf'd mesh.

Discover Regions. A one-click sweep (#3765) queries the repeaters you can reach directly (zero hops), routes the query straight to them, and reports back the regions they advertise — distinguishing "no nearby repeaters" from "repeaters that reported no regions."

Per-message overrides. Need to send a single message into a different region without changing your defaults? A scope control next to the compose box lets you override the region for just that message (#3704). It's one-off and never persisted, with a datalist of discovered regions.

See the scope on received messages. Incoming messages now show the region they were sent with (#3762): 🌐 for no scope, 🔒 with the region name when it's known, or 🔒 with a short hex code when it isn't — so you can tell at a glance whether a message arrived scoped, and to which region.

A saved-regions catalog. Regions you discover or use are kept in a catalog (#3783), and region pickers throughout the UI offer them as suggestions, so you're not retyping names or hunting for hex codes.

Try it

Open a MeshCore source, head to Settings to set a default scope, add a Region/Scope to a channel, or hit Discover Regions to see what's around you. The full walkthrough is in the MeshCore documentation.

Regions support landed across #3667 and PRs #3704, #3762, #3765, and #3783.