# Open WebUI v0.6.41 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** Open WebUI (https://openwebui.com)
- **Version:** v0.6.41
- **Released:** Dec 02, 2025
- **Impact Score:** 5/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Not verified
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/open-webui/updates/v0.6.41/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Open WebUI v0.6.41. Source highlight: [0.6.41] - 2025-12-02

## New Features
- 🚦 Sign-in rate limiting was implemented to protect against brute force attacks, limiting login attempts to 15 per 3-minute window per email address using Redis with automatic fallback to in-memory storage when Redis is unavailable. Commit
- 📂 Administrators can now globally disable the folders feature and control user-level folder permissions through the admin panel, enabling minimalist interface configurations for deployments that don't require workspace organization features. #19529, #19210, #18459, #18299
- 👥 Group channels were introduced as a new channel type enabling membership-based collaboration spaces where users explicitly join as members rather than accessing through permissions, with support for public or private visibility, automatic member inclusion from specified user groups, member role tracking with invitation metadata, and post-creation member management allowing channel managers to add or remove members through the channel info modal. Commit, Commit
- 💬 Direct Message channels were introduced with a dedicated channel type selector and multi-user member selection interface, enabling private conversations between specific users without requiring full channel visibility. Commit
- 📨 Direct Message channels now support a complete user-to-user messaging system with member-based access control, automatic deduplication for one-on-one conversations, optional channel naming, and distinct visual presentation using participant avatars instead of channel icons. Commit
- 🙈 Users can now hide Direct Message channels from their sidebar while preserving message history, with automatic reactivation when new messages arrive from other participants, providing a cleaner interface for managing active conversations. Commit

## Improvements
- ⚠️ **IMPORTANT for Multi-Instance Deployments** — This release includes database schema changes; multi-worker, multi-server, or load-balanced deployments must update all instances simultaneously rather than performing rolling updates, as running mixed versions will cause application failures due to schema incompatibility between old and new instances.

## Bug Fixes
- 🔄 Tool call response token duplication was fixed by removing redundant message history additions in non-native function calling mode, resolving an issue where tool results were included twice in the context and causing 2x token consumption. #19656, Commit
- 🛡️ Web search domain filtering was corrected to properly block results when any resolved hostname or IP address matches a blocked domain, preventing blocked sites from appearing in search results due to permissive hostname resolution logic that previously allowed results through if any single resolved address passed the filter. #19670, #19669
- 🧠 Custom models based on Ollama or OpenAI now properly inherit the connection type from their base model, ensuring they appear correctly in the "Local" or "External" model selection tabs instead of only appearing under "All". #19183, Commit
- 🐍 SentenceTransformers embedding initialization was fixed by updating the transformers dependency to version 4.57.3, resolving a regression in v0.6.40 where document ingestion failed with "'NoneType' object has no attribute 'encode'" errors due to a bug in transformers 4.57.2. #19512, #19513
- 📈 Active user count accuracy was significantly improved by replacing the socket-based USER_POOL tracking with a database-backed heartbeat mechanism, resolving long-standing issues where Redis deployments displayed inflated user counts due to stale sessions never being cleaned up on disconnect. #16074, Commit
- 👥 Default group assignment now applies consistently across all user registration methods including OAuth/SSO, LDAP, and admin-created users, fixing an issue where the "DEFAULT_GROUP_ID" setting was only being applied to users who signed up via the email/password signup form. #19685