no reason, just didn't occur to me

EMPP is probably better. More extensible, fewer bytes.

You might wanna spec a message type for these rules already, depending on how you want to identify token creators.

Trollbox devs can then query the display rules from the chain.

This is volatile data, you can't rely on this

Can't rely on it for important stuff, no. But, similar to tx history in herald or cashtab -- imo it's good to sort by timeFirstSeen when available (lets you do things like show unconfirmed txs "in order").

Usual approach is to

if tx is unconfirmed:

• use timeFirstSeen if available
• use Date.now() if not

if tx is confirmed

• use timeFirstSeen if available
• use block timestamp if not

For the purposes of a trollbox I think it's good enough.

my thinking is that the trollbox component will have a websocket subscription to a plugin that indexes these msgs by tokenid

there's a good chance that "old" msgs could lose timeFirstSeen, since who knows what chronik node is connected; these could have strange sorting.

but messages coming into the websocket are very likely to have timeFirstSeen, meaning live chat will be well sorted.

does that mean we can only index trollbox txs for ALP, and SLP needs some other spec?

No, it can be for both, we just have to pick one of the two encodings and stick with it