EOSE Completeness Hint

This NIP extends the EOSE message defined in NIP-01 with an optional third element that signals the client that the relay has sent every stored event matching the subscription's filters.

Motivation

EOSE as defined in NIP-01 signals the boundary between stored and real-time events. It does not tell the client whether there are more stored events the relay chose not to send. Relays commonly enforce an internal cap (e.g. 500 events per filter) that is independent of the client's limit. Clients today guess completeness by comparing the number of events received to the limit they requested:

• If fewer than limit events arrive, assume completion.
• Otherwise, issue another REQ with until set to the oldest received event's created_at, and repeat.

This heuristic has two well-known problems:

1. When the relay's internal cap is lower than the client's limit (e.g. cap 300, client asks for 500), the client receives 300 events and incorrectly concludes the result is complete, silently missing data.
2. When the total number of matching events happens to equal the relay's cap, the client cannot tell and must issue an additional REQ just to observe zero results. A relay that caps at 300 events will always be queried at least twice for any subscription that exhausts the cap.

A single extra field on EOSE removes this ambiguity.

Specification

A relay that implements this NIP MAY append a third element to the EOSE message: an array of hint strings.

["EOSE", <subscription_id>, [<hint>, ...]]

Currently three hint values are defined:

• "finish": the relay has sent every stored event matching the subscription's filters. The client SHOULD NOT paginate this subscription further.
• "more": the relay holds more matching stored events than it has sent. The client SHOULD paginate to retrieve them. A relay MAY send this hint, but is not required to, since detecting whether more events exist is not cheap on every storage backend.
• "auth": the relay may have more stored events matching the subscription's filters if the user performs AUTH (NIP-42). Relays MUST ensure an AUTH message (containing a challenge) is sent before the EOSE containing an "auth" hint.

The array MAY carry multiple hints simultaneously, and MAY be empty. Clients MUST ignore unknown hint values without error.

Their presence is definitive; their absence is not. When a relay omits the third element, or sends neither "finish" nor "more", the client SHOULD paginate using until = oldest received event's created_at as usual.

Clients that do not implement this NIP will ignore the extra element, as JSON arrays with trailing elements are accepted by conforming parsers and existing implementations index EOSE by position. Relays that do not implement this NIP continue to send EOSE with two elements and clients fall back to the legacy heuristic described above.

The hint refers only to stored events. It has no effect on the real-time delivery of new events, which continues under the regular NIP-01 rules until the client sends CLOSE or the relay sends CLOSED.

Future revisions of this NIP may define additional hint values. Implementations SHOULD accept unknown hint values without error and treat them as if absent.

Semantics around created_at ties

When a relay does not send "finish", multiple events may share the oldest created_at value in the response. Clients paginating with until = oldest_created_at risk missing events that share that timestamp. Relays SHOULD, when possible, advance the internal cursor so that all events with the boundary created_at are included in one response, emitting "finish" only when there are no older events remaining.

Relay advertisement

Relays implementing this NIP SHOULD include 67 in the supported_nips field of their NIP-11 document.

Examples

Relay has sent every matching stored event:

["REQ", "sub2", {"ids": ["abcd..."]}]
["EVENT", "sub2", {...}]
["EOSE", "sub2", ["finish"]]

Relay has more matching events:

["REQ", "sub2b", {"authors": ["abcd..."], "kinds": [1]}]
["EVENT", "sub2b", {...}]
... (300 events total)
["EOSE", "sub2b", ["more"]]

Relay has more matching events that require authentication:

["REQ", "sub2b", {"authors": ["abcd..."], "kinds": [1]}]
["EVENT", "sub4", {...}]
["AUTH", "challenge..."]
["EOSE", "sub4", ["auth", "finish"]]