Honesty · Staff

A setting that is off by default is not a fact

Our own pages said staff clock in "with a photo on every punch" — a photo that is optional, off until a venue switches it on. Eleven sentences promised something most venues would never see. How we found them all, why a source search found only seven, and the rule that now reads the rendered pages.


Sweeping our own staff page for claims, one sentence read: staff clock in on the till or their own phone, with a photo on every punch — a photo that, in the product, is optional, a setting a venue switches on. Off by default. A venue that had never opened that setting would read the page, expect a photograph of every clock-in, and never get one. The sentence was not false about the capability. It was false about the default, which is the part a new reader relies on.

Eleven of them

The same promise turned up on the six venue staff pages, in four page descriptions that search results show, and in one comparison post — eleven sentences. Each now says, in the same sentence, that the photo is the venue's choice: a photo on every punch if you switch it on; clock-ins with a photo if you want one. Not a footnote. The qualifier lives in the sentence, because a reader who stops at the sentence has to get the truth.

Why a search of the source found seven

The first pass searched the source files for the phrase and found seven. The guard we wrote afterwards — which reads every rendered page as text, not the source — found four more. Two were split across a line break in the code, so the phrase never appeared whole in any file. Two were worded differently — "photo clock-ins", "clocked in with a photo" — and needed the same optional-setting qualifier. A rule that checks the source checks what the writer typed; a rule that checks the page checks what the reader reads. Only the second one is the promise.

The rule now

A test walks every built page and every post. Any sentence that mentions a clock-in photo must carry the qualifier in that sentence, or the build fails naming the page and quoting the line. It failed three times while we fixed the site, each time on a sentence nobody had listed. The general form of the rule is the one worth keeping: a capability that depends on a setting is described with the setting, and a page is checked as the thing it is — rendered text — not as the file that produced it.


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