Community Newsletter, August 25th 2026

The newsletter is back. Five community plugins across four picks earned their slots in this issue after hands-on testing. A visualizer paints charts live in the chat, and a two-tool chain runs from Thingiverse search to an inline 3D viewer. A filter makes models plan their work in a task list that stays visible above the chat input. An approval gate holds every tool call until you confirm or cancel it. Alongside the picks sit a caching papercut and the community fix for it, a native mobile client the community built, a converted skeptic's appreciation post, and a sync tool from the organization's own workshop. There's also a comment thread worth reading and fresh numbers from the usage leaderboard, with a note on where the numbers come from. The short version of what's new in v0.11.1 comes last, along with the one setting two of our picks depend on.

Editor's Picks#

The ground rules from the first issue still hold. Every pick is installed and run before it earns its slot, so everything here worked on a real instance on the day we tested it.

@clsc's Inline Visualizer v2#

Readers of the March issue met the original Inline Visualizer, which built a chart off-screen and delivered the finished image into your chat. Version 2 changes the mechanism rather than the mission. In the author's own words: "v1 builds the visualization and shows you the finished poster. v2 hands the model a brush and a canvas and lets you watch it paint." The canvas drops into the reply mid-stream, and the chart rises into it the moment the model finishes writing. The v2.1 release notes led with fixes for every bug reported against 2.0, and the plugin has since moved on to 2.2.2.

The author states the trade-off as plainly as the pitch. The live canvas needs a platform-level permission, iframe Sandbox Allow Same Origin, which lets a plugin's embedded page talk to your instance with your session. The plugin can't narrow that permission to itself. He gives the advice we'd give anyway. If that permission doesn't fit your threat model, v1 remains available and fully static. Run one of the two rather than both. Best for anyone who asks their models for charts more than once a week.

@3deyes' Thingiverse Model Search + 3D STL Viewer#

Ask a chat assistant to find you a printable phone stand and you usually get a pile of links. Pages to open in another tab, files to download, and a session in your slicing software all sit between you and knowing whether the model is any good. @3deyes builds a shorter road. Thingiverse Model Search lets the model query Thingiverse in plain language, and it wants a free API token from a Thingiverse account. 3D STL Viewer renders any STL file right in the chat, with orbit controls, a wireframe toggle, and per-model camera memory. Chain them and one prompt carries the whole trip.

In our test, "search Thingiverse for a 3DBenchy, then show the top model" produced three tool calls back to back and ended with the boat spinning inline

The viewer also works alone. Upload an .stl file from your own drive and ask to see it. The viewer needs that same iframe Sandbox Allow Same Origin permission. Best for anyone whose 3D printer sits within arm's reach of their server rack.

@cooooookiecrisp's Task Management Enforcer#

Open WebUI ships built-in task management, where models call create_tasks and update_task to keep a live, visible checklist while they work through a request. Most models never volunteer to use either. The Task Management Enforcer is a toggleable filter that removes the choice. With the toggle on, every request opens with an instruction to plan first, and the task panel fills in and ticks off as the model works. Three detail levels and a strict mode set how hard the push is.

Before you rely on the Enforcer, know that the push is instruction-level pressure on the model rather than a hard gate, and a model can still cut corners. In our run, the model laid out three tasks and ticked each one off as it worked. The panel cleared itself once everything was done. Flip the filter per chat from the Integrations menu in the message input. Best for agentic work you want legible while it happens.

@jamolopa's Human in the Loop#

The first time a model calls a tool that does something irreversible, you find out how much trust you'd already extended. Human in the Loop is a pipe that appears in your model list and gates every tool call behind an in-chat dialog. The dialog shows the tool's name and the exact arguments it is about to run with, next to a Cancel and a Confirm. A valve, one of the pipe's settings, can auto-approve read-only calls by checking for names like search, get, list, and fetch. The dialog then only interrupts for actions that might change something. The pipe is MIT-licensed. After this pick was tested, the same job landed in core as an experimental Tool Permissions setting, new in v0.11.1.

Setup is honest work. The pipe talks to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint you configure in its valves, separate from your usual model picker, and the approval round-trip makes turns slower than a native chat. That cost buys you a moment to say no, the one thing tool-calling setups usually lack. Best for tools with real-world side effects, like sending, deleting, or buying.

From the Community#

@FrederikDeVree hit a papercut every vLLM and llama.cpp operator eventually meets. Put {{CURRENT_DATETIME}} in a system prompt and the prefix cache, the trick that lets a backend skip reprocessing an unchanged prompt, dies on every turn, because the substituted timestamp changes on every request. His KV prefix caching-safe date/time filter pins the value to the chat's creation time, so the prompt stays identical across turns and the cache holds from the second message on. He states the trade himself, plainly. A long-lived chat carries a stale clock.

If your models call tools, there's also a route around the papercut entirely. Open WebUI ships built-in date and time tools, so a model can call get_current_timestamp on demand and keep the answer fresh while the prompt prefix stays byte-identical. Between the filter and the built-ins, a clock in the conversation no longer has to cost you your cache.

On the mobile front, @cogwheel has been steadily building Conduit, a native iOS and Android client for Open WebUI. The project is GPL-licensed and just past two thousand GitHub stars. Five releases landed in the past month, a pace most side projects never sustain. Conduit is a community project, neither an official Open WebUI app nor endorsed by the team, and a phone can already run Open WebUI as a home-screen web app (a PWA). If you want a native client anyway, one exists. Conduit treats mobile sign-in, streaming stability, and sharing as first-class problems, and its maintainer keeps showing up.

The rarest genre on r/OpenWebUI surfaced recently. A skeptic's appreciation post from u/InsecureErasure describes dismissing the project more than once as bloat, trying other LLM frontends, then giving Open WebUI a real chance and landing on the other side. What turned the skeptic is the premise that "a lean core plus the ability to extend it beats a bloated core." The gaps get filled by plugins of your own choosing. The post closes by asking for constructive feedback for the small team behind the project rather than complaints alone, and its P.S. may be the best detail. The whole post was written with a model's help from inside Open WebUI, since English is not the author's first language.

New work lands on the community platform daily, and the o/openwebui feed remains the best place to watch it arrive.

From the Workshop#

The organization's own workshop ships tools too. oikb is an MIT-licensed command line tool that keeps Knowledge Bases in sync with wherever your documents actually live. Point it at a local folder, a GitHub repo, a Confluence space, an S3 bucket, or any of its 46 supported sources. Only new and changed files get uploaded, and a dry-run flag previews every sync before anything moves. A daemon mode keeps the syncing on a schedule, with push webhooks that sync a repo the moment it changes. The daemon can also be registered as an external tool server in your instance's settings, turning the daemon's sync trigger, dry-run preview, and history into tools a model can call. Toggle it on from the chat input's Integrations menu and that chat can refresh a knowledge base on request. We pointed the CLI at a docs folder on our test instance. The first sync uploaded, the rerun deduplicated server-side, and the diff preview reported nothing left to do. If your knowledge bases go stale because updating them is a chore, oikb is the chore automated several ways over.

From one prompt, the model dry-runs the sync, sees 1 file to modify and 3 unchanged, applies it for real, and confirms success with a status check

New in v0.11.1#

Open WebUI v0.11.1 landed alongside this newsletter issue, and the changes self-hosters will feel first have a dedicated release post, with video demos of most of them: Open WebUI v0.11.1: The Model Learns to Stop and Ask. The short version:

• Tool calls can pause for an Allow or a Deny before they run, behind an experimental Tool Permissions setting, the job @jamolopa's Human in the Loop pick has been doing as a pipe.
• A new ask_user builtin lets the model stop mid-answer and put a question card in the chat.
• The terminal panel's file browser gains Read-only badges, admin-scoped availability, per-user session tokens, and in-place document previews.
• /model joins the slash commands, chat search matches words in any order, and the sidebar's hover previews get an off switch.
• Streamed replies send only the new piece of text with each update, cutting a 250,000-character answer from roughly a gigabyte and a half of traffic to under two megabytes.

Two notes before upgrade day. The release carries security and access-control fixes that production deployments will want promptly. Its database migrations require multi-instance deployments to update every instance together, with a backup recommended first.

A Conversation Worth Reading#

@stupendousclam's Advanced Tool Use is a tool built so that, once attached, it can search and orchestrate every other tool in an install. The comment section under that listing has quietly become a model of how this community talks shop. @gabrielst reported that tool calls fired from the web chat but not over the API. Instead of guessing at a cause, the author reproduced the setup against a local instance and came back with the precise behavior. Model-attached tools reach the web frontend automatically, while raw API calls need Open WebUI's tool_ids field passed explicitly. @runicfate asked whether stacking many tool calls improves a model's context or degrades it. The answer refused to flatter the tool. Orchestration helps when the script filters and returns only conclusions, and hurts when tools dump huge raw payloads into the conversation. Even the headline benchmark stays scoped to a single workload rather than a suite.

The first issue's conversation section hoped for questions asked plainly, answers tested before they were typed, and limits stated by the person with the most reason to oversell. This thread clears that bar.

A Year on the Leaderboard#

As of August 24, the leaderboard's rolling-year view counts 142,287 messages across 837 models, reported by community members who opted in to sharing their usage. With the newsletter returning after a stretch away, the year view gives the fuller picture.

Top Models (1-year):

Top Countries:

The story of the year is churn at the top. gpt-4.1-mini's climb to first place on a +2,119% swing looks like high-volume workloads settling onto a cheap workhorse. gpt-5-5-thinking holds the quality seat right behind it. Stranger still is gpt-3.5-turbo, a model from 2023, re-entering the top five on a +10,719% delta. The board doesn't say why, and we won't guess. Further down, moonshotai/kimi-k2-instruct-0905 sits in the top ten and keeps open-weights models on the map. On the countries side, the United States leads South Korea by better than two and a half to one, with Germany close behind.

The standing caveat travels with every number. The data is opt-in, aggregated, refreshed hourly, and directional, while model names arrive exactly as reporting instances spell them. The raw export even carries one model name 153,456 characters long. It traces to a bug report of ours from last October, about a workspace model whose title was the name-your-knowledge-base placeholder repeated until the model could no longer be edited or deleted. The board has never been census data. Numbers this open can be gamed, so read the board as a community pulse rather than a measurement.

Where the Numbers Come From#

The leaderboard exists because individual operators chose to share their slice of it. The Sync Usage Stats modal spells out exactly what will be shared before anything moves. Syncing sends your Open WebUI version, model names and how often each gets used, message counts and timestamps, content lengths as character counts, and thumbs ratings. Message text, model outputs, and files never leave your instance through the sync.

Your instance is the only source of your data point. The model mix you run, at your scale, on your hardware, in your corner of the world, appears on that board only if you put it there. Every operator who syncs makes the community's shared picture a little sharper. The leaderboard page even offers a ready-made BibTeX entry, because the community's opted-in usage has quietly become a citable dataset. Sign in at openwebui.com/leaderboard, choose to share your usage, and your instance opens with that same modal before asking anything. Confirm and Open WebUI throws confetti for a moment worth celebrating.

Did You Know?#

Inline Visualizer v2 and the 3D STL Viewer both render inside sandboxed iframes, and both depend on one setting that ships switched off:

1. Open Settings from the user menu.
2. Go to the Interface tab and scroll to Artifacts.
3. Enable iframe Sandbox Allow Same Origin.

Core's own description is precise. The toggle allows artifacts to access same-origin browser APIs inside the sandbox. In plainer terms, a plugin's embedded page may then talk to your instance with your session. Same-origin access is what lets a viewer fetch the STL file you uploaded, or lets a live canvas coordinate with the chat around it. The permission is per-user and platform-level, so extend the permission the way you would extend trust to the plugin itself. Read the code of what you install, and turn the toggle back off if you stop using the plugins that need it.

That's It for This Week#

• Share what you build. Post your tools, functions, and experiments on the community platform. All four picks were found there.
• Sync your stats. The leaderboard gets sharper with every operator who opts in.
• Join the conversation on the official Discord server and r/OpenWebUI.

The Open WebUI Team