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A small week focused on the Open WebUI chat experience. Highlights below.

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Improvements

  • Focused Open WebUI chat. Arka’s Open WebUI now hides the Arena model picker and the chat Controls panel, so every conversation stays on the arka model.
  • Web search on by default in Open WebUI. Web search is enabled with DuckDuckGo out of the box. Override it with ENABLE_WEB_SEARCH and WEB_SEARCH_ENGINE.
  • Local-first web chat. When Ollama is running, web chat tries a small installed local model first and falls back to Gemini and Groq afterward. Chat keeps responding when cloud free tiers hit rate limits.

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Bug fixes

  • Thanks no longer restarts a build. Replies like “thanks”, “ok great”, or “got it” now get a short welcome instead of more code, HTML, or a new build.
  • No more empty chat replies. Retired cloud models, such as gemini-2.0-flash-lite, are skipped instead of leaving chat blank.
  • Models stay available. Arka only marks a model as retired when the provider actually reports it (for example, HTTP 410 or model_not_found). Models that were wrongly marked retired are restored automatically.