Changelog

All notable changes to soapbox.media are tracked here. Format follows Keep a Changelog; versioning follows SemVer.

Pre-1.0 minor versions correspond roughly to development phases of the pre-launch build leading into the November 2026 US midterms.

v0.6.81 · 2026-06-03

Changed

• Tighter pipeline cadence for a fresher site. Now that transcribe/classify/ score run through concurrency pools, processing latency — not cost — is the thing to cut (cost tracks episode volume, which is unchanged). Transcribe + classify go from every 4h → every 2h; score from every 6h → every 3h (score also refreshes the home snapshot, so the needle now updates 8×/day instead of 4×). Capacity check: score 8×240=1,920 mentions/day vs ~1,400 steady-state; classify 12×60=720 episodes/day vs ~230. Ingest stays 1×/day — its 3-episode cap is per-run, so more frequent ingest would over-sample high-volume channels past the 3/day "stance per audience" cap.

v0.6.80 · 2026-06-03

Added

• Cohort dropdown on admin add-channel. The /admin/channels form now has an Independent / Legacy selector (defaults to Independent), so a channel's cohort is set at add-time instead of defaulting to independent and being fixed up afterward (as 60 Minutes + Real Time had to be). Threaded through AddChannelInput.cohort → the insert in addYouTubeChannel.

v0.6.79 · 2026-06-03

Added

• Admin add-channel now auto-drafts the description. A new "Resolve & draft" step on /admin/channels resolves the handle, reports floor/dup status, and generates a one-sentence rationale in the site's house voice (Haiku, grounded on the channel's own YouTube description + recent video titles + assigned lean) — pre-filling the editable field so the admin edits rather than writes from scratch. previewYouTubeChannel() / generateChannelRationale() in src/lib/channels.ts; generation never blocks the add (falls back to a template on error).

v0.6.78 · 2026-06-03

Fixed

• Transcribe no longer strands episodes on a transient blip. runTranscribe previously marked every failure transcript_status='failed' and only ever re-queried 'pending', so a one-off Supadata outage (2026-06-02, ~95 episodes failed in a single run) permanently abandoned episodes whose captions were perfectly fetchable. getVideoTranscript now returns a discriminated result distinguishing a terminal "no captions" (206 / empty / bad video) from a transient error (5xx / 429 / network). Transient failures leave the episode pending and bump a new episodes.transcript_attempts counter, retrying up to MAX_TRANSCRIPT_ATTEMPTS (3) before giving up — so blips self-heal while a genuinely-broken video still terminates. Backfilled the 89 stranded episodes.

v0.6.77 · 2026-06-01

Changed

• Cohort badge (mic/tv) now uses the same styled shadcn tooltip as the L/M/R lean badge instead of the native browser title, so hover tooltips look consistent on /log and /channels. Added a TooltipProvider (150ms delay, matching /log) around the /channels list to host it. Also swapped the em dash in the cohort tooltip labels for a middle dot.

v0.6.76 · 2026-06-01

Changed

• /log legend row: lean + cohort legends left-justified, status-dot legend right-justified, to visually separate the category legends from the pipeline-status legend.

v0.6.75 · 2026-06-01

Changed

• Consolidated the /log table legends: the L/M/R lean legend, the cohort (mic=independent / tv=legacy) legend, and the status-dot legend now sit together in one right-aligned row directly above the episode table. The cohort legend moved out of the "Episode receipts" heading.

v0.6.74 · 2026-06-01

Added

• Cohort legend (<CohortLegend>) on /channels and /log — defines the mic = independent / tv = legacy icons next to the channel list + episode table.
• Cohort breakdown on the panel cards:
  • Panel balance gains two stacked bars — shows-by-cohort and reach-by- cohort (independent vs legacy) — alongside the existing L/M/R bars. StackedBar generalized to per-segment colors.
  • Panel scale gains a "By cohort" line with the icons + each cohort's show count and combined reach (getPanelStats now returns channelsByCohort / audienceReachByCohort).
  • Both gated on legacy actually being present.

Changed

• Home subheadline: "legacy institutions" → "legacy media"; em dash → comma.

v0.6.73 · 2026-06-01

Added — LEGACY COHORT LAUNCH 🚀

• Legacy media is now live alongside independent. Flipped PUBLIC_COHORTS to ['independent', 'legacy'], which simultaneously:
  • Blends the master Soapbox Index across both cohorts (≈L+0.1, reach- weighted, volume-capped).
  • Reveals the two sub-needles under the master — Independent (≈L+0.5) vs Legacy (≈R+1.5) — with the caption "same issues, same scoring."
  • Shows the cohort icon (mic = independent, tv = legacy) on /channels and /log, and surfaces the 9 legacy channels + their episodes.
• Copy reframe. Home headline → "Where is online political media leaning right now?"; subheadline introduces the independent-creators vs legacy- institutions split. Site title, social meta, footer, and OG image updated from "alternative media discourse" → "online political media, quantified."
• Methodology gains a "Cohorts: independent vs legacy" section.

v0.6.72 · 2026-06-01

Added (gated — invisible)

• Independent vs Legacy sub-needles under the master Soapbox Index on the home page. Two compact needles (<SubNeedle>, reusing SoapboxNeedle at a smaller size) showing each cohort's Index — so the blended master headline arrives with the split that explains it. Gated on PUBLIC_COHORTS.length > 1, invisible until the flip.
• The home snapshot (writeHomeSnapshot) now also computes and stores per-cohort indices (HomeSnapshot.cohorts), so the sub-needles read from the precomputed row — no extra per-request work. Field is optional for backward compatibility with older snapshots.

v0.6.71 · 2026-06-01

Added (gated — invisible)

• Cohort badge (<CohortBadge>): a small icon + hover label marking a channel/episode as independent (mic) or legacy (tv), placed next to the L/M/R lean badge on /channels and /log. Gated on PUBLIC_COHORTS.length > 1, so it renders nothing while the site is independent-only and appears automatically when legacy is exposed at launch. Threaded cohort through the channels query and the EpisodeTableRow (the view already exposes it).

v0.6.70 · 2026-06-01

Changed

• Taxonomy + methodology copy refresh. Dropped the "alt-media" abbreviation from the /issues taxonomy page (intro + activity-card header) and the /methodology page; reframed around the platform (YouTube + podcasts). De-dried the taxonomy intro and removed the "(not yet bucketed)" TODO leaking into the "Political figures & parties" group.
• Methodology now documents volume normalization. The /methodology Index section explains the two deliberate choices — audience-reach weighting and the 3-episodes/day per-channel cap — framing the Index as "stance per unit of audience" rather than who posts most. (Previously only the reach-weighting formula was disclosed; the cap was undocumented.)

Fixed

• scripts/drain.ts rides out transient blips — a stage round now retries with backoff (up to 5 consecutive errors) instead of crashing the whole drain on a one-off Supadata/Supabase fetch failed.

v0.6.69 · 2026-05-31

Performance

• Parallelized transcribe too. The transcribe stage was still serial (the slow part of a full drain). Now runs through the same mapPool at concurrency 8 — each Supadata call is multi-second, so the request rate stays ~2/s, well under the 10/s Supadata limit. TRANSCRIBE_LIMIT raised 40→100 (the wall-clock budget remains the real cap; the pool stops pulling at the deadline). Transcribe rounds drop from ~3–6 min to well under a minute.

v0.6.68 · 2026-05-31

Performance

• Parallelized classify + score (cron throughput). Both stages processed episodes/mentions one-at-a-time; the classify cron's ~90/day capacity was the pipeline bottleneck. They now run through a bounded-concurrency worker pool (src/lib/concurrency.ts → mapPool): classify at concurrency 10, score at 15, sized for an Anthropic Max-tier account. Per-run limits raised accordingly (CLASSIFY_LIMIT 15→60, SCORE_LIMIT 80→240); the per-stage wall-clock budget is still the real cap, so runs finish under the 300s function limit (the pool stops pulling new work at the deadline).
  • Net: classify throughput ~5–6× per run (~90/day → ~500+/day at the same cron cadence), bounded now by the Anthropic tier rather than the serial loop. Counters are mutated inside the pool, which is safe (single-threaded).
  • New npm run drain (scripts/drain.ts): loops the parallelized stages until the backlog clears — used to drain the legacy seed immediately rather than waiting ~1–3 days for the crons.

v0.6.67 · 2026-05-31

Added (foundation — invisible)

• Channel cohorts: independent vs legacy. Groundwork for an independent-vs-legacy comparison and a blended master Index. New channels.cohort column (default independent, indexed); all 86 existing channels backfilled to independent. episode_pipeline_summary view gains cohort.
• All public reads are now cohort-aware, gated by a single control point (src/lib/cohort.ts → PUBLIC_COHORTS = ['independent']). The Index (fetchScoreRows), issue/topic drill-downs, channel list, panel/system stats (shows, episodes, hours), and the /log feed all filter to the public cohort. This lets legacy channels be seeded and ingested invisibly — legacy data accumulates but never surfaces until we flip PUBLIC_COHORTS and ship the comparison UX. Zero behavior change now (every channel is independent). Non-political legacy content stays a non-issue: it classifies to no-signal and never enters scoring/weighting.
  • Known follow-up: the secondary scale totals (transcripts/classifications counts in SystemStats) are still whole-pipeline; tighten at launch.

v0.6.66 · 2026-05-31

Performance

• Drill-down pages (/channels/[id], /issues/[slug], /topics/[slug]) were ~7s — now DB-filtered. Each called fetchScoreRows() — the full ~17K-row sentiment_scores deep join — then filtered in JS for the one channel/issue/topic. They pulled the entire table to show a single slice (the same problem the home page had, never fixed for the drill-downs).
  • New fetchScoreRowsFiltered() anchors on classifications and filters at the DB via the indexed issue_slug / episode_id columns, returning only the rows in scope (e.g. iran-conflict 2,137 rows, a channel ~700, vs 17,673 every time). Same ScoreRow shape and scored-only semantics as fetchScoreRows; paginated for hot issues that exceed 1,000 rows.
  • getIssueDrillDown filters by issue_slug; getTopicDrillDown resolves the topic's child issues then filters by their slugs; getChannelDrillDown resolves the channel's episode ids then filters by them. The downstream JS filters become no-ops on the already-scoped set, so the numbers are unchanged — only faster. Stays live (no snapshot/staleness).

v0.6.65 · 2026-05-31

Performance

• /log now server-paginates its episode table. The page was loading the entire ~2,000-row archive every request to power client-side search/sort/paginate — ~1.3s TTFB that grows with the archive. (Measured: the underlying episode_pipeline_summary view runs in ~64ms — the DB was never the bottleneck; the cost was fetching + serializing the full row set.)
  • New GET /api/episodes endpoint: sort, search, and pagination run in Postgres (getEpisodeTablePage — .range() + count: 'exact'), returning only the ~25 rows a page shows plus the total count. Search is sanitized before the PostgREST or() filter; stage columns sort by their underlying status field.
  • EpisodeDataTable gained a serverSide mode (TanStack manual sorting/filtering/pagination + debounced search + abortable fetch). /log uses it; the per-channel table keeps client mode (small, preloaded sets). Expandable per-episode receipts (v0.6.64) work unchanged.
  • /log TTFB no longer scales with the episode count — it fetches one page regardless of archive size. Trade-off: the table now hydrates client-side (a brief "Loading episodes…") rather than being in the initial HTML.

v0.6.64 · 2026-05-31

Added

• Expandable per-episode receipts on /log. Each scored episode row now expands to show exactly what the pipeline classified and scored: every issue mention with its sentiment chip (L+/R+, the home Index convention), a 1–5 intensity meter, and the supporting quote the model flagged — plus an episode net-lean summary. Delivers on the page's "receipts, in the open" promise and gives the operator a fast lens to spot mis-scores or bad issue-mappings before scaling the channel set.
  • Lazy-loaded on expand via a new GET /api/episodes/[id]/mentions route (one episode at a time), so the table never eager-loads the full classifications join. Mentions are sorted strongest-first (|sentiment| × intensity).
  • Built on the existing shadcn data table (shadcn <Table> primitives + TanStack getExpandedRowModel); a caret appears only on episodes that produced classifications. New <EpisodeMentions> sub-row component.
  • Quotes are excerpts only, never full transcripts.

v0.6.63 · 2026-05-31

Fixed

• Cron classify silently stalled — transcripts.id doesn't exist. The scheduled classify stage reported pendingFound=0 on every run for >24h while 68 transcribed episodes sat ready. Root cause: runClassify did .select("id, …") / .order("id") on the transcripts table, whose PK is episode_id — there is no id column. The query 400'd every run, the error was swallowed (const { data } = with no error check), the loop broke, and the empty result read as "queue empty." Broken since v0.6.47 (the "add ORDER BY" fix used the wrong column name); masked because the CLI catchup (scripts/classify.ts, episode-first since v0.6.48) did the real draining.
• Fix: cron classify is now episode-first, mirroring the CLI. Query the episodes table for classify_status='pending' AND transcript_status= 'fetched' (cheap — no text), then load each transcript's text on demand inside the loop. This eliminates the ≈80MB "pull every transcript" payload that also caused the response-size/timeout fragility, and the pending-episode query now checks its error and throws instead of silently reporting an empty queue — so this class of stall fails loud, not silent.
• Drained the 68-episode backlog (classify + score) so the Index reflects current data.

v0.6.62 · 2026-05-30

Added

• "What alt-media is talking about" card on /issues. The issues page was the only main page with no data card above its list — a static taxonomy reference with no live signal. Added a topic-level attention rollup above the taxonomy: the 23 issues' mention volume aggregated into the same 11 topics the list is grouped by, ranked by mention count, each with a volume bar, the topic's volume-weighted lean tint, and a deep link to its /topics/[slug] page.
  • Reads per-issue volume/lean from the existing dashboard_snapshot (one row, no heavy join) via readHomeSnapshot(), with a live getDashboardData fallback when the snapshot is absent. So the page stays fast and adds no new DB aggregation.
  • New <IssueActivityByTopic> component (pure presentational, prop-driven — same pattern as PanelBalance / PanelScale). Bars + headline use raw mention count ("how much is this discussed"); lean tint uses volume-weighted lean so the direction matches the Index basis.
  • Deliberately distinct from the home page's "Biggest movers" (a lean-swing leaderboard) — this is an attention-volume distribution, answering the /issues reader's question "which areas are hot, which should I open?"

v0.6.61 · 2026-05-30

Performance

• Home page TTFB: precompute the dashboard instead of recomputing per request. v0.6.60's cache() fix only deduped the double fetchScoreRows call within one render — it can't cache across requests, and cache() is per-render scope only. Direct prod timing after v0.6.60 still showed ~9.5s TTFB on / (every visitor recomputed the full ~17K-row deep join from scratch), while /channels and /issues stayed ~0.4s. Root cause is structural: the home page re-aggregates all history on every hit, but the underlying data only changes when the daily pipeline runs.
  • New dashboard_snapshot table (migration 20260530120000_dashboard_snapshot.sql): one JSONB row per window key (home:7) holding the precomputed { dashboard, breakdown }. Service-role only.
  • writeHomeSnapshot() computes getDashboardData() + getIndexBreakdown() once (sharing the per-request fetchScoreRows cache → one DB pass) and upserts the row. Called at the end of the score cron (the last data-producing stage) and the manual /api/cron/pipeline run; best-effort so a snapshot failure never fails the cron. Also runnable ad hoc via npm run refresh:snapshot.
  • readHomeSnapshot() + home page now reads that single indexed row (~sub-100ms). Falls back to the live computation when the snapshot is missing or unavailable (first deploy / before first cron / pre-migration), so the page never breaks. <IssueContributionsChart> takes the breakdown as a prop (live fetch retained as fallback).
  • Net: home / TTFB drops to ~0.4s for every visitor, with no cold-miss cliff on deploys (unlike a request-level cache). Removes the 17K-row join from the request path entirely; scales as the panel grows. Delivers the "cached SQL views / materialized aggregates" TODO that was noted in src/app/page.tsx.

v0.6.60 · 2026-05-30

Performance

• Home page TTFB ~15s → expected ~4s. Direct prod timing showed 14.6–15.8s TTFB on /. Root cause: fetchScoreRows() was called TWICE per render (once by getDashboardData() for the dashboard, once by getIndexBreakdown() via the sibling <IssueContributionsChart> server component) — each paginating the full 17K-row deep join independently, ~35 round trips to Supabase apiece.
  • Wrapped fetchScoreRows with React cache() so all server-component callers within one render share the same Promise. Halves the work on the home page; no behavior change.
  • Bumped fetchScoreRows pageSize 500 → 1000. The 500 cap was added in v0.6.3 because Vercel's edge→Supabase route returned short pages on big response payloads and the old length < pageSize terminator interpreted that as end-of-data (silent truncation). v0.6.51 fixed the terminator to only stop on truly-empty pages, so short pages no longer truncate; can safely go back to 1000-row pages. Halves round-trip count again (17 pages instead of 34). Per-row payload is small (~300 bytes, no text), so a 1000-row page is ~300KB — comfortably under response cap.
• Combined effect: home page does ~17 round trips instead of ~70. Other pages that call fetchScoreRows once each (/issues/[slug], /topics/[slug], /channels/[id]) get the page-size win (about 50% faster) but not the dedup win (they only call it once).
• Re-time after deploy with curl -o /dev/null -s -w "TTFB %{time_starttransfer}s\n" https://www.soapbox.media/ to verify.

Notes

• The longer-term play is materializing the rolling-window aggregation in Postgres (a view or materialized view computed by cron) so app reads a small result set instead of all 17K scored rows. The original aggregate.ts comment from v0 flagged this as the "v1 will move this" path. v0.6.60 buys time but doesn't replace it — at 100K+ scored rows the per-render scan will still be slow even with dedup + bigger pages.

v0.6.59 · 2026-05-30

Fixed

• /log scored status falsely rendered "done" for un-classified episodes. Regression from v0.6.54's status-cascade rewrite. When an episode hadn't been classified yet, classification_count = 0 and scored_count = 0, so sc >= cc evaluated 0 >= 0 → true → "done". The pre-v0.6.54 code caught this with a leading cc === 0 ? "na" branch; my rewrite only caught the cc=0 case when classify_status='processed' (mapping to "no-signal") and let cc=0 + classify_status='pending' fall through. Result: 132 episodes were rendering as scored=green on /log when they were nowhere near scored. Visible on the activity log as rows with transcribed=gray, classified=gray, scored=green — a logical impossibility the cascade should have prevented.

  Fix: explicit classified === "pending" ? "pending" guard before the sc >= cc check in getEpisodeTableRows. The score column now faithfully cascades: can't be scored before classified, can't be classified before transcribed.

v0.6.58 · 2026-05-30

Fixed

• Podcast reach auto-refresh removed — PodScan's audience_size is unreliable for the panel's purposes. v0.6.57's reach-refresh pass attempted to hit PodScan's /podcasts/{id} endpoint and pull pickPodscanReach from the response, but the immediate post-deploy refresh exposed the gap: zero of 44 podcasts updated. Probing the endpoint directly showed audience_size IS exposed — just nested at reach.audience_size (not top-level where the helper looked) — but the values are wildly off from publicly-reported listener estimates:

  • Joe Rogan Experience: DB 14.5M vs PodScan reach.audience_size: 4.7M
  • Mark Levin Show: DB 7.0M vs PodScan reach.audience_size: 100

  Our stored numbers align with Edison-style weekly-listener estimates; PodScan's appears to be its own internal-tracking metric (a lower bound, often missing entirely). Auto-refreshing from PodScan would crash podcast reach 50–70% to less-real numbers, so podcasts are now intentionally NOT in the refresh path. Removed getPodcastById + pickPodscanReach calls from runIngest and scripts/ingest.ts; the 41-channel YouTube refresh (which works perfectly, daily) is the entire auto-refresh story now.

Changed

• Honest copy on /channels. Intro paragraph: "YouTube subscriber counts refresh daily during the ingest pass; podcast audience estimates are editorial and reviewed at panel-add time." (Previously: "Reach figures refresh daily from the YouTube Data API and PodScan" — half wrong.)
• <PanelScale> freshness label: now reads "YouTube subs refreshed Xh ago · podcast reach editorial" — was "Reach refreshed Xh ago," which implied podcasts were also auto-refreshed.

Notes

• getPodcastById helper stays in src/lib/podscan.ts — it's a clean by-id lookup that may be useful for other contexts (e.g., verifying a candidate matches what's in the panel during admin add-flow); just not for reach refresh.
• The 44 podcast rows still have their reach_updated_at backfilled to created_at (17 days old). That's accurate — we genuinely haven't refreshed them. The PanelScale label correctly reads off MAX(reach_updated_at) which is now-today (the YT refresh time), so the visible signal is right.
• Memory [[podcast-reach-editorial]] written so this gotcha isn't re-discovered next time someone tries to wire PodScan to channels.reach.

v0.6.57 · 2026-05-30

Fixed

• channels.reach was set-once-at-seed and never refreshed. Three call sites wrote reach (seed-channels.ts, channels.ts add-flow, enrich-legacy-wishlist.ts); none refreshed it. 84% of the panel was carrying 17-day-old subscriber/listener counts. The /channels intro paragraph claimed reach was "pulled live" — technically true, at seed time only. Index math weights by log10(reach), so stale reach = mildly wrong weights.

Added

• Reach refresh piggybacked on the daily ingest cron. The ingest pass already iterates every active channel; now it also refreshes each channel's reach in the same loop. YT is batched via getChannelDetailsBatch (one API call for up to 50 channels, ~1 quota unit each — free tier handles 10,000/day); podcasts are per-row via the new getPodcastById helper in src/lib/podscan.ts (PodScan has no batch endpoint). Failures are logged-and-skipped — a transient API blip on one channel must not abort the whole ingest pass. Only positive reach values overwrite the stored stat; a 0 / null response keeps the existing number so a lookup miss doesn't zero out a known channel.
• channels.reach_updated_at column. New TIMESTAMPTZ with now() default. Backfilled to created_at for existing rows (conservative "at least this stale" floor; the seed scripts didn't track it). Bumped on every refresh attempt — even when the number didn't change — so staleness-detection isn't misleading.
• Freshness signal on <PanelScale> — top-right of the card now reads "Reach refreshed Xh ago" (MAX(reach_updated_at) across active channels). Same relativeTime shape as the existing "Latest data" timestamp on <SystemStats>.
• /channels intro paragraph tightened — now reads "Reach figures refresh daily from the YouTube Data API and PodScan during the ingest pass" instead of the previous "pulled live" wording, which is honest about cadence.

Changed

• CLI npm run ingest now also refreshes reach (mirrors the cron path via the same helpers). Per-channel log line includes the before→after delta when reach changes (reach: 5,990,000 → 6,012,000 ↑ 22,000) so manual catchup runs print visible movement.

Notes

• New migration add_channels_reach_updated_at — non-destructive ALTER TABLE … ADD COLUMN, backfill from created_at, set NOT NULL + default now().
• pickPodscanReach (same field-fallback as seed-podcasts.ts's pickReach) is now duplicated in three files (seed-podcasts.ts, pipeline.ts, scripts/ingest.ts). Worth extracting to src/lib/podscan.ts in a follow-up cleanup once the dust settles.

v0.6.56 · 2026-05-30

Changed

• Stat cards re-homed by reader question, not by convenience. /log's System Scale was carrying the panel-composition stat ("Combined audience reach", added in v0.6.54) which actually answers "is this panel representative?" — a /channels question, not a /log question. The /log reader is asking "is the pipeline running?". Moved the reach number off /log and onto a new <PanelScale> card on /channels where it belongs.

Added

• <PanelScale> card on /channels — composition stats (shows tracked, combined audience, platform rows, largest single show). Same visual shape as <SystemStats> on /log so the cards rhyme, but the question they answer is different. Sits ABOVE <PanelBalance> so the page reads magnitude (raw numbers) → distribution (stacked bars) → list (per-lean show grid).
• New getPanelStats() aggregate helper. Channels-table only — no episode/classification/score queries. Returns shows tracked + L/M/R count, audience reach + L/M/R split, platform row count + YT/Pod split, and the largest single show by max reach. Mirrors the unique-show methodology of <PanelBalance> and the old getSystemStats.audienceReach field so all three surfaces agree on the same number.

Changed (cont.)

• /log System Scale trimmed to 4 pipeline-only stats (was 5): shows tracked, episodes analyzed, hours of audio, issue mentions. Grid shifted from lg:grid-cols-5 to md:grid-cols-4 — same breathing room per stat. getSystemStats still computes audienceReach + audienceReachByLean for any downstream caller; it's just not displayed on /log anymore.

v0.6.55 · 2026-05-30

Added

• Panel balance badge on /channels. Two stacked horizontal bars (count + reach) show the L/M/R distribution side by side so the asymmetry between editorial-intent-balanced counts and what-the- landscape-looks-like reach is visible at a glance. Current state: shows are 36% L / 14% M / 50% R but reach is 28% L / 15% M / 57% R — right-leaning shows carry larger average audiences (2.77M vs 1.93M L), so reach skews right. Badge says this plainly rather than letting the intro paragraph imply uniform balance. Asymmetry sentence renders dynamically — only shown when avg-reach ratio across cohorts ≥ 1.25×, so it'll quiet down if the panel rebalances.
• The honest copy explicitly notes that log10(reach) weighting in the Index dampens the asymmetry but doesn't erase it — a methodology cue for readers comparing the published Index to their intuition.

v0.6.54 · 2026-05-30

Added

• "No signal" status on the public activity log. ~8% of processed episodes (161/1941 today) are off-taxonomy — classified successfully but produced no political-issue mentions (sports, true crime, celebrity, etc.). These previously rendered as the same gray dots as "pending" episodes, with the scored column tooltip saying "Not applicable" — confusing because gray reads as in-progress, and a "complete but empty" episode isn't in-progress. New no-signal status with a hollow outlined dot (border-only, transparent fill — reads as "registered but empty") on both the classified and scored columns when classify_status='processed' and classification_count = 0. Tooltip: "No political signal · issue taxonomy didn't match." Added to the visible legend.
• Combined-audience reach stat on /log. Headline number for "how big is this panel?" — sum of unique-show reach (max per show across platform rows, so dual-platform shows aren't double-counted; matches the methodology for the by-show comparison from yesterday's enrichment script). Sublabel breaks reach out by editorial lean (L · M · R), same shape as the existing show-count sublabel — surfaces cohort balance on the same surface.

Changed

• episode_pipeline_summary view: added classify_status. Migration add_classify_status_to_pipeline_summary_view — non-destructive CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW. Column had to be appended at the end of the SELECT (Postgres can't reorder existing view columns; only append). The view's only consumer (getEpisodeTableRows) updated to select it.
• Hours-of-audio stat reformatted. Was 1.4K (compact) which read like a placeholder; now 1,433 (full number) with sublabel ≈ 60 days continuous instead of the static Long-form, Shorts filtered. Confirmed 100% of episodes have duration_sec — the data was always plumbed; just the formatter obscured it.
• Issues-mentions sublabel: dynamic count + folded sentiment-scores stat. Was hardcoded Across 15 issues (stale — taxonomy is at 23). Now reads the active-issue count from issues table and renders Across N issues, all sentiment-scored. The standalone "Sentiment scores" stat was dropped to make room for combined-audience — post-v0.6.53 score == mentions for the autonomous-cron steady state, so the standalone number wasn't pulling its weight.

v0.6.53 · 2026-05-30

Fixed

• CLI scripts had the same .range() family bug the cron path got fixed for in v0.6.51 — the previous audit pass (v0.6.52) only covered src/, not scripts/. Caught by the catchup drain itself: the classify stage drained cleanly (393 → 0, added 4,758 new classifications), but scripts/score.ts told the catchup loop "queue drained" while 5,809 classifications were actually unscored. Root cause: both pagination loops in score.ts had no .order() AND the data.length < pageSize early-out — so the script only ever read page 0 of classifications and sentiment_scores, scored the 200-ish overlap in page 0 across 3 catchup iterations (600 scored), then page 0 showed "all scored" → "drained" sentinel fired. Same dual-bug as the original v0.6.47.
• scripts/score.ts — added stable .order("id", asc) on the classifications loop and .order("classification_id", asc) on the sentiment_scores loop (UNIQUE constraint makes it a valid pagination key); removed both data.length < pageSize early-outs. Same canonical pattern as aggregate.ts:155-209.
• scripts/classify.ts — happened to work in the catchup drain (the filtered pending set fits in a single page below the response cap), but carried both the non-unique-sort-key bug and the short-page early-out. Added id as a stable tiebreaker after published_at; removed the short-page early-out. Future-proofs against the panel doubling.

Notes

• Full audit now extended to scripts/ directory; both CLI surfaces (classify.ts + score.ts) and one already-correct file (transcribe.ts uses single .limit(), not a paginated loop) conform.
• The 5,809-classification score backlog this leak created will be drained separately via npm run score -- 8000 on the fixed v0.6.53 code (~$4 in Haiku, ~30 min wall-clock).

v0.6.52 · 2026-05-29

Fixed

• Audit-pass: remaining .range() antipatterns surfaced by the post- v0.6.51 grep -n "range(" src/ sweep. Three callers had subspecies of the same family of pagination bugs. None were currently breaking the cron (that was v0.6.51), but each would have bitten silently as the panel keeps scaling — so fixing all of them is part of "runs autonomously."
  • src/lib/audit.ts paginatedSelect — the generic helper used by /admin/channels-audit had both halves of the v0.6.47/v0.6.51 bug: no .order() and a data.length < pageSize early-out. Hardcoded .order("id", ascending: true) inside the helper (all three callers use tables with an id PK; the helper's contract is now unambiguous — "I paginate by id") and dropped the short-page break.
  • src/lib/episodes.ts getEpisodeTableRows — had empty-page-only termination ✓ but ordered by published_at DESC alone, which isn't unique. Two episodes posted in the same second could re-cross page boundaries and appear duplicated in the /log table. Added .order("id", descending) as the stable tiebreaker after the business order; UI behavior unchanged when published_at values are distinct (the common case), now deterministic when they collide.
  • src/app/channels/page.tsx — single-call .range(0, 999) silently truncates at 1000 active channel rows. We're at 85 today but the scale-out target is ~200 unique shows (2–3 platform rows each, easily 400–600), well within the lifetime of this code. Converted to the canonical paginated loop (.order("id") + empty-page-only break); JS-side groupByShow → maxReach already re-sorts so the user-visible order is unchanged.

Notes

• Repo now has 8 .range() callers, all conforming to the audit pattern in [[pagination-stable-order]]: stable .order(<unique_key>) AND data.length === 0 as the only loop terminator. The pattern is duplicated across 5 files (aggregate.ts ×2, discovery.ts, pipeline.ts ×3, audit.ts, episodes.ts, channels/page.tsx) — a good candidate for extraction into a shared helper if/when scope allows.

v0.6.51 · 2026-05-29

Fixed

• Cron classify + score short-page early-out → silent backlog stall (round two). Same pendingFound=0 symptom as v0.6.47, different half of the same pagination antipattern. v0.6.47 added the required ORDER BY but kept if (data.length < pageSize) break; as the loop terminator. That early-out fires on any short page — and Vercel's edge→Supabase route hits a response-size cap before the row cap on runClassify's deep-join query (each row carries full transcript text). Once transcripts grew past the response threshold (1,779 rows as of today), the first page came back short, the loop exited, the in-memory array only held the oldest already-processed rows, and the JS filter to classify_status='pending' returned []. Result: 3 of every 4 classify cron runs today found 0 pending despite 393 actually pending (08:30/12:30/16:30 UTC; only the 00:34 + 04:34 runs processed work). Fix: terminate on empty page only — matches the canonical pattern at aggregate.ts:155-209 (v0.6.3) and the getSystemStats pagination at aggregate.ts:450-461. Applied to all three paginated loops in pipeline.ts (runClassify transcripts, runScore classifications, runScore sentiment_scores).

v0.6.50 · 2026-05-29

Added

• Mention-volume signal alongside lean in "Biggest movers." The home card now ranks issues on two orthogonal axes — lean swing (L↔R movement) and mention-volume swing (attention shift) — and shows both. A row earns its spot if |leanΔ| ≥ 0.5 OR volumeRatio crosses [0.67×, 1.5×]; both numbers display so visitors can see which signal (or both) put it there. Ranking uses max(|leanΔ|/2, |log2(volumeRatio)|) so a 2-point lean swing and a 2× volume swing carry equal weight, and the existing MOVER_MIN_MENTIONS = 25 floor applies on both windows so neither axis fires on thin samples. Cap moved into getDashboardData (6 rows) — the home page just renders data.movers directly now. Mobile keeps the original 3-column layout for readability; desktop expands to 6 columns (adds Last week / Mentions / Volume).
• Per-issue mention-volume sparkline on /issues/[slug]. New <VolumeAreaChart> component (neutral gray, non-negative y-axis, no zero reference line — counterpart to <IndexAreaChart>) renders alongside the existing lean trend in a 2-up grid. Answers the question the lean chart can't: "is anyone actually talking about this issue right now?" Powered by a new rollingVolumeTrend() helper in aggregate.ts that mirrors rollingLeanTrend's windowing but keeps mid-series zero days (a stretch of zero is a real "issue went silent" signal — lean is just undefined at 0/0, volume isn't); leading-only zero days are trimmed so the chart starts at first activity.
• IssueMover extended with currentMentions, prevMentions, volumeRatio (week-over-week mention-count ratio). IssueDrillDown gains volumeTrend: { values, dates }. No new pipeline cost — both surfaces are derived from the existing fetchScoreRows() data.

v0.6.49 · 2026-05-29

Changed

• scripts/discover-socialblade.ts handles markdown + smarter triage. Added a markdown-table parser (auto-detected by extension or content) so Social Blade pages saved via a browser markdown-clipper extension work directly — previously only HTML was supported. Tightened the bucketing: beyond "in panel" / "legacy" / "candidate", the script now flags "non-US/non-English" (Cyrillic / Devanagari / Burmese / CJK scripts; known Spanish/Bengali/Hindi outlets) and "non-political" (gaming, true-crime, finance-tutorial) so the actionable candidate list isn't drowned by 100-row globals. Name normalization strips "The X Show" / "X Podcast" boilerplate to catch Social Blade ↔ panel mismatches (Ben Shapiro ↔ "The Ben Shapiro Show", etc.).

• docs/legacy-media-wishlist.md — appended a "From Social Blade Top 100 News (US, 2026-05-29)" section with cable / broadcast, digital-native, local-affiliate, and ambiguous-cohort entries surfaced by the scrape.

v0.6.48 · 2026-05-29

Changed

• CLI classify is episodes-first. The old scripts/classify.ts paginated the entire transcripts table with text embedded in the SELECT — a 1700- row × ~100KB/row payload that hit Postgres's statement_timeout once the panel hit ~80 channels. Refactored to query episodes (no text) filtered on classify_status='pending' AND transcript_status='fetched', then load each transcript on demand inside the loop. Orders by published_at DESC so the most-recent backlog drains first. The cron path in pipeline.ts may benefit from the same treatment if/when it starts timing out at larger scale — for now its 300s function budget masks the inefficiency.

Added

• scripts/discover-socialblade.ts — one-time parser for saved Social Blade "Top by category" HTML pages (politics, news, etc.). Direct fetch is blocked by Cloudflare, so you save the page from a browser, point this script at the file(s), and it: extracts every /youtube/channel/UC… link with name + sub count, filters to ≥300K, dedups against the existing panel by both channel ID and normalized name, and prints a sorted candidate list. Run via npm run discover:socialblade <file.html> [file2.html] ….

v0.6.47 · 2026-05-29

Fixed

• Cron classify + score paginated without ORDER BY → silent backlog stall. Two of today's four scheduled classify runs (08:30 and 12:30 UTC) reported pendingFound = 0 despite 564 episodes actually being pending. Once the transcripts table grew past 1000 rows, PostgREST's .range() pagination returned non-deterministic pages — some runs got pages where every row was already classify_status='processed', so the cron silently decided there was nothing to do and exited in 9 s. This is the exact pagination gotcha called out in CLAUDE.md; the CLI scripts had stable .order("episode_id") since v0.6.29 but pipeline.ts never got the same treatment. Fixed in all three paginated reads (transcripts, classifications, sentiment_scores) by adding stable PK ordering. Backfill drained manually via CLI after the fix shipped.

v0.6.46 · 2026-05-28

Fixed

• Add-channel flow now requires a lean rationale. The 21 channels seeded today (and Sam Harris) were missing classification_rationale, so they showed up on /channels without the one-sentence descriptions every other channel has. Backfilled all 22 by hand in the project's editorial voice; threaded the field through addYouTubeChannel and the /admin/channels add form (required, validated, with a placeholder example) so the gap can't recur.

v0.6.45 · 2026-05-28

Added

• /admin/channels — admin flow to add a channel + deep-ingest history. Editor enters a YouTube handle/URL + L/M/R lean; the server action resolves via the YT API, enforces the 300K subscriber floor, inserts, and deep-ingests the last 30 episodes. The cron then catches up transcribe→classify→score automatically. Shared logic in src/lib/channels.ts (addYouTubeChannel, extractYouTubeHandle) so the CLI tool and the admin UI go through the same code path. Page also shows the 20 most recently added channels. AdminNav adds a new Channels tab; the existing audit moves to the Audit label.
• Per the channel expansion strategy, the existing 8 newly-seeded channels (Valuetainment, TPUSA, Knowles, Klavan, Indisputable, Legal AF, Katie Phang, Talking Feds) were seeded via SQL + npm run backfill:channel-history and are catching up via cron. Panel is now 56 unique shows (69 channel rows).

v0.6.44 · 2026-05-28

Changed

• Cron stages run multi-times/day to fix the backlog dynamic. Ingest stayed daily (10:00 UTC); transcribe and classify now run every 4h (6×/day), with classify offset +30 min; score runs every 6h (4×/day). Same total work per day, smoother throughput — with the v0.6.43 time-budget guard each run completes cleanly, so the only knob needed is frequency. At 48 channels this keeps the pipeline caught-up (transcribe 240/day vs ~148 ingest/day; classify ~90/day vs ~40/day transcribed). Empty runs are free.

Added

• Channel expansion strategy draft (docs/channel-expansion-strategy.md) for the 48→200 scale-up: curation criteria, sourcing ladder, ~$870/mo cost model at 200 channels, throughput requirements (hourly classify), phased rollout, and open editorial decisions (reach floor, lean balance target, cost ceiling). Not implemented — review artifact.

v0.6.43 · 2026-05-27

Fixed

• Classify cron 504 after the taxonomy grew to 23 issues. This morning's scheduled classify ran the full 300s on a 15-episode batch and was killed mid-batch (12 episodes done, no usage_log row) — the larger taxonomy makes each episode slower and produce more mentions, so a fixed CLASSIFY_LIMIT can overshoot. Added a wall-clock budget (STAGE_TIME_BUDGET_MS = 240s): the classify loop stops when the budget is hit and always completes cleanly, processing as many episodes as fit. CLASSIFY_LIMIT stays as an upper bound; the run now reports stoppedAtTimeBudget. (Adapts automatically as the taxonomy keeps growing.)

v0.6.42 · 2026-05-27

Added

• Topic drill-down pages (/topics/[slug]) — the deeper Phase 2 read path. getTopicDrillDown rolls a parent Topic's child issues into a topic-level lean + 30-day trend (same reach×intensity weighting as the Index, so the numbers stay consistent across issue/topic/overall). Each topic page shows the needle, trend chart, and its child issues ranked by share of voice. The /issues topic headers now link to them. ScoreRow carries issue_topic_slug (added to fetchScoreRows).

v0.6.41 · 2026-05-26

Two-level taxonomy — Phase 2 (read path) + discovery integration + staged classify-broadening. (Parent Topics contain child Issues; see docs/taxonomy-v2-design.md.)

Added

• Issue taxonomy page grouped by Topic. /issues now lists issues under their parent Topic (Foreign Policy, Health, Rule of Law, …), making the two-level structure visible. Index/scoring unchanged.
• Discovery promote is Topic-aware. Promoting a candidate now requires picking a parent Topic; the new child issue is created under it (issues.topic_slug). discovery_candidates.assigned_topic_slug records it.
• 7 gap-filling issues staged (inactive). Health care, Social Security & Medicare, Justice/rule-of-law, Government corruption, Gun policy, Drug policy, Race & discrimination — to cover the empty/thin Topics classify is currently blind to. Staged active=false with draft L/R anchors, so they do NOT affect classify or the Index until the anchors are reviewed and activated.
• Migrations taxonomy_v2_topics_layer and taxonomy_v2_gap_issues_and_discovery_topic (DB; additive only).

v0.6.40 · 2026-05-26

Changed

• Admin login screen + menu (replaces HTTP Basic Auth). /admin/* is now gated by a cookie session instead of the browser Basic Auth dialog. New /admin/login form checks ADMIN_PASSWORD and sets an httpOnly cookie (value = SHA-256 of the password, 30-day expiry); middleware redirects there when the cookie is missing/invalid. New /admin landing menu (Pipeline · Costs · Channels audit · Discovery) and a Log out control in AdminNav. Same password as before; cron auth (CRON_SECRET) and the public /eval/label tool are unaffected. After deploy, existing sessions are logged out and must sign in via the new form.

v0.6.39 · 2026-05-26

Emerging-issue discovery with admin oversight — the fixed 16-issue taxonomy no longer silently misses new topics (e.g. it would now surface something like a "Trump anti-weaponization fund" for review).

Added

• Harvest (Phase 1): the classify pass now also returns substantive political topics that don't fit the taxonomy (OffTaxonomyTopic — label + quote), stored in the new discovery_topics table. Applies to both the cron runClassify and the CLI. Marginal token cost; no extra LLM pass. Off-taxonomy episodes (0 taxonomy mentions) are exactly where new issues hide.
• Cluster & rank (Phase 2): src/lib/discovery.ts + src/modules/discover merge recent off-taxonomy labels into candidate themes via one Haiku pass, score each by reach × recency × frequency, and rebuild the pending discovery_candidates set. Triggered by a weekly cron (/api/cron/discover, Mondays 11:00 UTC) and npm run discover.
• Review queue (Phase 3): /admin/discovery (Basic-Auth) lists ranked candidates with example quotes + counts, and offers Promote (form → new taxonomy issue, with human-written L/R positions), Merge (into an existing issue), or Ignore. Added to AdminNav.
• Migration discovery_tables (discovery_topics, discovery_candidates; RLS-on/no-policies per convention).
• One-time harvest-only backfill npm run discover:backfill (re-runs classify over recent transcripts writing ONLY off-taxonomy topics, never duplicating classifications) to populate discovery without waiting for days of cron. Initial backfill of 40 episodes harvested 106 topics → 42 candidates.

Guardrail

• Discovery proposes, a human disposes — the system never edits the taxonomy on its own; only the admin Promote action (which requires the editor to write the L/R positions) creates an issue. Decided candidates' source topics stay linked so dismissed themes don't resurface.

v0.6.38 · 2026-05-26

Fixed

• Cross-platform episode duplication. Shows tracked on both YouTube and a podcast feed (e.g. The Rubin Report) publish the same episode to both, which was ingested twice and double-counted in the Index. New src/lib/dedup.ts matches a cross-post by show + normalized title + publish date; ingestion (both the cron runIngest and the CLI scripts/ingest.ts) now skips an episode already present on a sibling channel. Because channels ingest reach-desc, the higher-reach copy is kept and the re-post is skipped. Backfill: removed the 18 redundant copies already in the DB (with their classifications/scores; transcripts cascaded) — all were lower-reach podcast copies; where only one copy was processed, that one was kept regardless of reach. No remaining cross-platform dup groups.

v0.6.37 · 2026-05-26

Fixed

• Cron split into per-stage jobs to fix a 300s timeout. After v0.6.29 made classify do real work, the combined nightly pipeline exceeded Vercel's 300s function limit — the 2026-05-26 run returned 504, classified 73 mentions, then was killed before score (left them unscored) and before writing usage_log. The four stages now each run as their own cron with a full 300s budget: /api/cron/{ingest,transcribe,classify,score}, staggered at :00/:15/ :30/:45 past 10:00 UTC. Stage logic was extracted unchanged into src/lib/pipeline.ts (stages never call each other, so they split cleanly — see ARCHITECTURE.md). The old /api/cron/pipeline endpoint is kept for manual full runs (logs as source "manual"). Each stage logs its own usage_log row.

v0.6.36 · 2026-05-25

Changed

• Methodology page de-hyped toward a lab-notebook voice. Rewrote the intro from marketing framing ("the way you'd want it measured", "source of truth") to a factual statement of what the page documents; softened "hand-curated" → "curated". The rigorous middle (formulas, channel-skew honesty, known limitations) and the bottom "Why this exists" mission section are unchanged — the goal was to keep hype away from the method. Per reader feedback that the page mixed marketing jargon with the actual methodology.

v0.6.35 · 2026-05-25

User-feedback clarity pass on two charts (methodology rewrite tracked separately).

Changed

• Biggest Movers redesign. Added column sub-headings (Issue · Last week · This week · Change). Replaced the ambiguous ↑/↓ delta with a neutral ←/→ arrow showing direction of movement on the left–right axis, decoupled from position (which keeps its L/R color). Added a one-line decoder so it's clear an issue can move right yet still sit in left territory. Per user feedback that the chart was hard to decipher.
• Index contributions chart caption rewritten in plain language. Removed the inline Σ(...) formula (now linked to Methodology) and clearly distinguishes the bar ("how much the issue moved the Index") from the number ("average lean"), since a reader found the old wording opaque.

v0.6.34 · 2026-05-25

Fixed

• Logo alignment nudge. Wordmark moved up another 1px (−2px total) to sit centered against the crate icon.

v0.6.33 · 2026-05-25

Fixed

• Header on mobile + logo alignment. The nav row didn't wrap, so on narrow screens it overflowed and overlapped the wordmark. The header now wraps (nav drops below the logo on mobile) with a tighter mobile gap. Also nudged the wordmark up 1px so it sits centered against the crate icon.

v0.6.32 · 2026-05-25

Fixed

• Issue/channel trend charts: width + vertical range. The chart was capped at max-w-md, so inside the wide drill-down cards it filled only the left half. IndexAreaChart now takes a maxWidthClass prop (default max-w-md for the home hero; "" on the drill-downs so it fills the card). It also takes includeZero (default true): the home Index keeps its 0-anchored range, but issue/channel charts now fit to their own data — an entity that sits far from neutral (e.g. a channel at L+4.8) uses the full chart height instead of squashing the line into a third with dead space above it. The zero reference line is hidden when not anchoring to zero.

v0.6.31 · 2026-05-25

Changed

• /log table polish. Status legend moved from the pagination footer to above the table (right-aligned), so it's visible before scrolling. Date column now numeric (MM/DD/YYYY) instead of spelled-out month. Both changes also apply to the "Recent episodes" table on channel pages (shared component).

v0.6.30 · 2026-05-25

Added

• Trend charts on issue and channel pages. The home-page IndexAreaChart (Recharts/shadcn) now also appears on /issues/[slug] ("How this issue has trended") and /channels/[id] ("How this channel has trended"), showing the entity's rolling lean over the last 30 days. New reusable rollingLeanTrend() helper in aggregate.ts (same daily-rolling, trailing 7-day-window logic as the home sparkline, scoped to a single issue/channel); getIssueDrillDown / getChannelDrillDown now return a trend series. The chart is hidden when there are fewer than 2 points.

v0.6.29 · 2026-05-25

Fixed

• Classify reprocessing loop (head-of-line blocking). The cron + CLI classify queue was defined as "transcripts with no classification row." An episode that yields 0 mentions never got a row, so it stayed "pending" forever and was re-sent to Sonnet every run. The first 15 pending happened to be genuinely off-taxonomy (sports, true crime, celebrity, stale/junk clips), so they permanently clogged the CLASSIFY_LIMIT=15 batch — ~$1/run for 0 new classifications, while newer classifiable episodes behind them were never reached and the backlog never drained. Diagnosed from live data: 142 pending, 350K input tokens → 60 output tokens across 15 episodes (model correctly returning []).
• Fix: new episodes.classify_status column (migration add_episode_classify_status). It's set to processed after each classify attempt regardless of mention count, and the pending queue keys off it. 0-mention episodes are recorded as done and never re-sent; the batch advances and the backlog drains. Backfill marked the 946 episodes that already had classifications as processed; the never-reached remainder stay pending so they're classified properly (not skipped). A partial index keeps the pending-queue scan cheap. Applied to both runClassify (cron) and scripts/classify.ts (CLI).

v0.6.28 · 2026-05-25

Changed

• "Biggest movers" now requires a minimum sample. An issue must have at least MOVER_MIN_MENTIONS (25) classifications in both the current and prior 7-day window to qualify as a mover. Previously a quiet week could produce a large, noisy lean swing and headline the card on a thin sample (e.g. an 18-mention week outranking a 400-mention one). The swing is only trustworthy once each side of the comparison has enough rows behind it. Verified against live data: the change correctly drops a thin-week issue and promotes a large-sample swing to #1. Mention counts on the issue drill-down (30-day window) were spot-checked against the DB and match exactly.

v0.6.27 · 2026-05-25

Housekeeping: finish the v0.6.26 dead-code removal and track the dev guide.

Removed

• IndexSparkline.tsx and EpisodeList.tsx — v0.6.26 emptied these to stubs but never git rm'd them. Nothing imports either; deleting the files completes that release's intent.

Added

• CLAUDE.md is now tracked in the repo — the working guide for Claude Code (commands, release ritual, guardrails, infra facts). Previously untracked/local-only.

v0.6.26 · 2026-05-25

Pre-beta audit: stale content, dead code, docs.

Changed

• Activity is back in the top nav (it was footer-only) now that /log is a real surface.
• Methodology page refreshed: removed the stale Bannon transcript-coverage limitation; corrected "15 issues" → 16 (incl. the Iran conflict); replaced the unvalidated "85–90% accurate" claim with an honest note that scoring is model-produced and being calibrated against an independent human gold set.
• ARCHITECTURE.md + README brought current: Supadata (not the old scraper), RLS-on/no-policies + service-role + no-store fetch, shadcn/TanStack UI, real cron batch limits, the UNIQUE(classification_id) constraint, episode_pipeline_summary view, gold-set tables, and the /admin surfaces.

Removed

• Dead code: IndexSparkline (replaced by IndexAreaChart) and EpisodeList (replaced by EpisodeDataTable), plus the now-unused getRecentEpisodes / getEpisodesForChannel / attachPipeline helpers in episodes.ts. (The two component files are emptied here; git rm them.)

v0.6.25 · 2026-05-25

Fixed

• /log header sort-arrows overflowing. A constant sort arrow on every column header spilled into the neighbouring header on tight columns. The arrow now appears only on the actively-sorted column (standard data-table pattern), with overflow-hidden on the header cells as a safety. Headers fit cleanly.

v0.6.24 · 2026-05-25

Home-page trend chart + /log header fix.

Added

• Interactive Index trend chart on the home page — a Recharts area chart (via shadcn chart primitives, src/components/ui/chart.tsx) replacing the static SVG sparkline under the needle. Shows the 30-day rolling Soapbox Index with hover tooltips (date + L/R value), a neutral zero baseline, an L/R-oriented y-axis, and a range caption. Adds the recharts dependency.

Fixed

• /log table header overlap. v0.6.22's column percentages fit the cell contents but not the header words, so narrow headers ("Category", "Transcribed") overflowed and their sort arrows bled into the next column. Rebalanced the widths (still summing to 100%) so every header fits cleanly.

v0.6.22 · 2026-05-24

Online gold-set labeling + /log table polish.

Added

• Online scoring-calibration tool (/eval/label) to replace the CSV gold set. Multiple independent labelers score the same blinded items (lean-coded source only, no channel name / model score / ids) on sentiment (−5…+5), intensity (1…5), confidence (1–3), + notes — instructions and the three calibration examples are built into the page. Shared link + name to start; forward-only and resumable. New gold_items / gold_labels tables (migration 20260524000002), seeded by npm run seed:gold-set (same stratified sample as the CSV exporter; model answer frozen per item). Submissions go through a server action on the service-role client — no client-side DB access; the page is noindex.

Fixed

• /log table no longer scrolls horizontally. Switched the fixed-layout column widths from pixels (which summed wider than the container and forced a scrollbar) to percentages that sum to 100%, so the table always fits. Long titles/channels truncate with tooltips. Also aligned the page back to the site-standard width, made channel names link to the channel page, and swapped native title tooltips for Radix tooltips.

v0.6.21 · 2026-05-24

/log cleanup: admin split, shadcn/ui, real data table.

Added

• shadcn/ui adopted as the component system (the codebase already used cn, clsx, tailwind-merge and shadcn-style markup). Added theme tokens to globals.css + tailwind.config.ts (additive — existing literal-gray pages unaffected), components.json, and src/components/ui/: button, input, table, badge, dropdown-menu.
• Episode receipts → a real data table (EpisodeDataTable, TanStack Table + shadcn). Columns: category (L/M/R), date, channel, video, type, length, and Transcribed / Classified / Scored status (colored dots with Radix tooltips) — all sortable, with search, pagination, and a column-visibility menu. Channel names link to the channel page. The channel drill-down's "Recent episodes" reuses the same table (Category + Channel columns hidden).
• episode_pipeline_summary view (migration 20260524000001) computes per-episode classify/score counts in Postgres, so /log loads one light result set instead of thousands of join rows.
• Admin nav (AdminNav) across the gated /admin/* tools.

Changed

• Pipeline health moved to /admin/pipeline — it's operational detail for internal consumption, not public. The public /log is now scale + searchable episode receipts only.

v0.6.20 · 2026-05-24

Data integrity: one score per classification, enforced.

Fixed

• Duplicate sentiment scores. Overlapping score runs (CLI + the cron's score stage + the daily cron) raced: each read a classification as unscored and inserted, with no unique constraint to stop them. Result was 257 duplicate score rows across 172 classifications, double-counting in the Index and per-issue/channel aggregations. Deduped (kept earliest per classification; scores 8,031 → 7,774, now exactly 1:1 with classifications).

Added

• UNIQUE (classification_id) on sentiment_scores (migration 20260524000000) — duplicate scores are now structurally impossible.

Changed

• Score insert → upsert with onConflict: classification_id, ignoreDuplicates in both scripts/score.ts and the cron runScore, so overlapping runs no-op cleanly instead of erroring against the new constraint.

Note

• Also closed out the failed-YouTube recovery: 369 of 370 episodes that the broken cron had marked failed were re-transcribed via Supadata and flowed through classify + score. Only 1 was genuinely caption-less.

v0.6.19 · 2026-05-24

/log reworked into the public pipeline + scale transparency page.

Added

• Pipeline health on /log. New PipelineHealth component surfaces the usage_log data that previously only lived on /admin/costs: four per-stage status cards (ingest/transcribe/classify/score) showing each stage's current health in plain English plus a small last-7-run trend strip, and a detailed recent-runs table with per-stage counts and any error message. Operators can see at a glance which stage is broken; users get real transparency. Shows no cost/token data — that stays on the operator-only /admin/costs.
• Per-episode pipeline progress in the receipts list. EpisodeList now shows each episode's progress through all four stages (Ingested → Transcribed → Classified → Scored) with done/failed/pending/partial state, instead of a single transcript-status badge. Makes the failed-YouTube backlog and where each episode stalled visible at a glance. Applies on both /log and the channel drill-down.

Changed

• System scale moved from /channels to /log and redesigned. New lineup: shows tracked (with L/M/R split), episodes analyzed (of total ingested), hours of audio, issue mentions, sentiment scores, and coverage-since date. Dropped "words transcribed" (redundant with hours). Header now shows data freshness. Counts are live, so they reflect the post-dedup classification total correctly.
• Fixed a latent early-break in the hours-of-audio pagination (same class of bug as the classify/aggregate pagination issues): now advances by rows returned and stops only on an empty page.

v0.6.18 · 2026-05-24

Cron is end-to-end. Cleanup + the real root cause.

Fixed

• Cron transcribe now succeeds. The actual blocker was operational, not code: SUPADATA_API_KEY was missing/empty in the Vercel runtime, so getVideoTranscript threw and every YouTube episode was marked failed. (Masked until now because the v0.6.16 key/cache bugs kept the cron from ever reaching the Supadata call.) Set the value in Vercel; a seeded episode transcribed cleanly (succeeded: 1, ~1.4s round-trip, Supadata credit consumed). With this, the full pipeline runs unattended: ingest → transcribe → classify → score.

Changed

• runTranscribe no longer swallows errors in a bare catch {} — failures (missing env var, Supadata outage) are now logged. This is what would have surfaced the SUPADATA_API_KEY problem on day one.

Removed

• Temporary transcribe diagnostic logging (served its purpose locating the Supadata-key failure).

Note

• The v0.6.17 platform-by-map change is retained as a robustness improvement, but it was not the root cause — the missing env var explained the failure on its own. No evidence the channel embed was actually broken.

v0.6.17 · 2026-05-24

The last link in the cron chain.

Fixed

• Cron transcribe failed every YouTube episode without calling Supadata. Once v0.6.16 fixed the key and the cache, the cron could finally see pending episodes — but it still marked them all failed in ~50ms, never reaching Supadata. Root cause: the channel:channels!fk(platform) embed didn't expose .platform reliably at runtime, so row.channel?.platform was undefined and every episode flunked the === "youtube" guard. Replaced the embed with a direct channel_id → platform map in runTranscribe, which is embed-shape-proof. (The classify/score stages still use channel embeds; auditing those is a separate follow-up.)

v0.6.16 · 2026-05-24

Pipeline reliability release. Three compounding bugs kept the production cron from doing useful work while the CLI worked fine; all are fixed here.

Fixed

• Stale cached reads (the big one). Supabase-js issues reads as fetch GETs, and the Next.js App Router caches fetch by default — so every server-side read (the cron and server components) was frozen at the first snapshot taken after each deploy. The cron reported identical results across separate runs (pendingFound: 1504 twice while the live table was at 552) and never saw its own writes or the CLI's. db.ts now forces cache: "no-store" on every Supabase request so reads always hit the live database. force-dynamic on the route did not reliably cover the client's fetches; forcing it at the client is the durable fix.
• classify dedup pagination. scripts/classify.ts built its "already classified" set with .limit(50000), which Supabase silently caps at the project Max Rows (1000). Once the classifications table grew past ~1000 rows the dedup set was incomplete, so episodes were re-classified on every pass — catastrophic under a loop (a catch-up run reclassified 234 episodes ~95× into 24k duplicate rows before being caught). Now paginates via .range() and terminates only on an empty page. The runaway duplicates were cleaned up out-of-band.

Added

• scripts/catchup.sh — full-pipeline drain that runs ingest, then loops transcribe/classify/score until each queue empties, with hard per-stage iteration caps so a logic bug can't run away unattended.

Operational (no code)

• Corrected Vercel's SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY: it held a legacy anon JWT, not a service-role key. With RLS enabled on all tables and zero policies, an anon key reads/writes nothing — which is why the cron saw an empty database while the CLI (real service key) worked. Swapped to the new sb_secret_… key. (RLS-with-no-policies is a latent landmine to address separately.) CRON_SECRET rotated.

Removed

• Temporary transcribe diagnostic logging from the cron route.

v0.6.14 · 2026-05-14

The actual fix for YouTube transcripts: swap the unmaintained scraping library for a managed transcript API.

Background

The youtube-transcript npm library had two compounding problems:

1. Library bug. Returned "Transcript is disabled on this video" for videos that demonstrably have captions on YouTube. Documented issue since mid-2024 — the library does HTML scraping and breaks whenever YouTube changes the embedded ytInitialPlayerResponse shape.
2. Cloud-IP blocking. Even when the library worked, YouTube throttled responses from Vercel and GitHub Actions egress pools. Strip the captionTracks field silently, library reports "disabled," scraper-aware infrastructure has a bad day.

A half-day of misdiagnosis (v0.6.4 through v0.6.13) chased these two intertwined issues separately. v0.6.4 flipped ordering to oldest-first hoping caption-timing would resolve. v0.6.13 moved transcribe to GH Actions hoping IP rotation would. Neither fixed it because they were both treating symptoms of two problems as if they were one.

Changed

• Transcripts now fetched via Supadata (https://supadata.ai), a managed YouTube transcript API. We hit GET /v1/transcript with the YouTube watch URL; they handle scraping, proxy rotation, library maintenance — everything we were doing badly. ~$17/mo on the Pro plan for our ~3000-transcript/month volume. Uses mode=native so we only fetch existing captions, never pay for AI generation.
• youtube-transcript package removed from dependencies. Was the source of the cascading failures.
• Transcribe stage re-enabled on Vercel cron. The reason we moved it to GH Actions in v0.6.13 (cloud-IP blocking) doesn't apply when we're calling Supadata's API rather than scraping YouTube directly. Vercel cron now handles the full pipeline again: ingest → transcribe → classify → score in a single 10:00 UTC run.
• GH Actions transcribe workflow demoted to manual-only. Kept around as an escape-hatch trigger for ad-hoc catch-up runs, but no longer scheduled. Now requires SUPADATA_API_KEY repo secret.

Setup steps

1. Add SUPADATA_API_KEY to Vercel environment variables (Settings → Environment Variables → New).
2. Add SUPADATA_API_KEY to GitHub repo secrets (only needed if you'll use the manual workflow).
3. Push v0.6.14. Tomorrow's 10:00 UTC Vercel cron will use the new path.

v0.6.13 · 2026-05-14

Architectural fix for the YouTube-on-Vercel transcript problem: transcribe stage moves off Vercel onto GitHub Actions.

Diagnosed

The youtube-transcript library was reporting "Transcript is disabled on this video" for videos that actually have captions available on YouTube. Manual spot-check of three failed-from-Vercel videos showed two with auto-generated captions, one with owner-uploaded captions — all present and visible on the YT site. Gregg's home network successfully transcribed the same videos.

Root cause: YouTube's anti-scraping behavior silently degrades the watch-page response for IPs it flags as suspicious. The page loads, but the captionTracks field in the embedded JSON is stripped out. The library can't distinguish "captions were never there" from "captions were hidden from this IP" and reports both as "disabled." Vercel's egress IP pool is flagged; home networks and CI runners generally aren't.

Changed

• Transcribe disabled on Vercel cron. Without this, Vercel's 10:00 UTC run would mark today's pending YT episodes as failed, poisoning the queue before GH Actions runs at 10:30 UTC. The cron now skips the transcribe stage entirely and writes a no-op stage record to keep usage_log shape stable.
• New .github/workflows/transcribe.yml runs daily at 10:30 UTC, invoking npm run transcribe -- 100 from GitHub's runner IP pool. Also exposes a workflow_dispatch trigger so it can be run manually from the Actions tab. Requires two repo secrets: NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL and SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY.

Pipeline architecture, post-v0.6.13

10:00 UTC (Vercel) ingest → classify → score 10:30 UTC (GitHub Actions) transcribe

End-to-end latency from publish → scored:

• Podcast (PodScan inline transcript): ~24h
• YouTube (GH transcribe → next-day Vercel classify): ~25h

Setup steps to activate

1. Push v0.6.13.
2. In the GitHub repo: Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret. Add:
   • NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL
   • SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY
3. Manually trigger once via Actions tab → "Daily transcribe" → Run workflow, to validate the runner IPs work for the YouTube scraper.
4. Confirm success rate is high (>80%) before relying on the schedule.

v0.6.12 · 2026-05-14

Transcribe throughput bump: TRANSCRIBE_LIMIT 10 → 40 per cron run.

Changed

• TRANSCRIBE_LIMIT raised from 10 to 40. Diagnostic SQL showed ~49 YouTube episodes ingested per 24h vs only 10 transcribe attempts per cron — the pending pool was growing by ~90/day with the rest of the pipeline starved for fresh content. 40 attempts at ~1s each adds ~30s to cron wall time, still well inside the 300s function budget. Won't fully close the gap with daily YT ingest, but cuts the daily growth rate substantially while the v0.7 retry mechanism is built.

Known limitation

At ~30-40% transcribe success rate (legitimate disabled-captions long-tail) and 40 attempts/day, throughput is still loss-making relative to ~100 YT ingests/day. The real fix is v0.7: retry-after- N-hours so fresh same-day caption failures get a second chance, and possibly a hybrid newest+oldest ordering strategy so today's discourse isn't permanently stuck behind a slow-burning backlog.

v0.6.11 · 2026-05-14

Root-cause fix for the 81% score-stage failure rate observed on May 13 and May 14 crons. Diagnosed via the logging added in v0.6.9.

Fixed

• Haiku's positive-number "+" prefix is now tolerated. Score output was arriving as {"sentiment": +4.2, "intensity": 3} — Haiku "helpfully" prefixing positive numbers with a plus sign. JSON spec doesn't allow a leading +, so JSON.parse rejected the entire response. Added normalizeLlmJson helper that strips leading + in JSON value positions (after : , or [, before a digit). Doesn't touch + inside string literals.
• Score prompt updated to explicitly instruct "no leading + on positive numbers" plus three worked examples (negative, positive, zero). Prevents the issue at the source; the parser fix is the defensive belt to the prompt's suspenders.

Impact

This was the silent failure path that produced ~13 of 16 failed score attempts on each of the last two cron runs (~80% loss rate). With v0.6.11 deployed, the next cron should score at the ~98% success rate we saw in yesterday's local catch-up run.

v0.6.10 · 2026-05-14

Sparkline expansion. Adds context to the home page trend line without changing its visual character.

Changed

• Reference lines at ±5 in addition to the existing dashed-zero line. Gives the eye a magnitude anchor at a glance — previously every value just floated relative to whatever the data range happened to be.
• Endpoint date labels under the chart. "Apr 20 ───── May 14" so the time range is readable without crossing back into the surrounding copy. Drives off a new sparklineDates field on DashboardData, populated in parallel with the values themselves.
• Range summary beneath the dates: Range L+0.3 to L+1.4 · rolling 7-day index. Replaces the previous "24-day history · rolling 7-day Index" label, which only said how many days of data existed without saying what was in it. Sorted most-L to most-R for natural reading across crossings of zero.

Technical

• aggregate.ts now returns sparklineDates: string[] alongside sparkline: number[] — same length, same order. Days with no data are skipped in both arrays so they stay in sync.

v0.6.9 · 2026-05-14

Score-stage error logging. Mirrors the transcribe-stage logging added in v0.6.4. Diagnostic for the 81% score failure rate observed in the May 13 and May 14 cron runs.

Fixed

• Score errors now surface in logs. runScore was using bare catch {} and ignoring failed sentiment_scores inserts silently. Now logs [score] <ErrorClass> for classification <id>: <message> on any thrown error from scoreClassification (Anthropic API errors, JSON parse failures, rate limits), and a similar line for Supabase insert errors. Next cron run will tell us why score has been failing 13/16 attempts.

v0.6.8 · 2026-05-13

Hotfix for v0.6.7: the OG image build failed on Vercel because Satori (the renderer behind next/og) does not support <text> SVG elements. The three gauge endpoint labels (L 10, 0, R 10) have been moved out of the SVG and rendered as regular HTML below the gauge using flex positioning. v0.6.7 tagged but did not successfully deploy.

v0.6.7 · 2026-05-13

OG image visual alignment with the live site.

Changed

• OG image now matches the actual home page identity. Previous v0.6.6 render used a flat horizontal gradient bar for the needle and omitted the crate logo. Replaced with the same half-circle gauge SVG the home page renders (identical geometry, gradient stops, tick marks, and needle), and added the wooden-crate logo to the top-left brand row. Visiting the live site after seeing a share now feels continuous rather than disjoint. The crate is inlined as base64 from the 256×256 favicon asset (~56KB payload, much smaller than the 1024×1024 source).

v0.6.6 · 2026-05-13

Social-share polish and brand attribution.

Changed

• Page title rewritten. Was "Soapbox: The FiveThirtyEight of Alternative Political Media" — that framing was useful internally as a north star but is the wrong thing to put on a tab, invites premature comparison, and the product should stand on its own. Now: "Soapbox · Alternative media discourse, quantified".
• Meta description aligned with home page hero. Identical wording so the social-share blurb matches what visitors see on landing.
• Footer tagline updated to match: "alternative media discourse, quantified" replacing the older "alt-media discourse, updated daily."
• Built by Breakfastball LLC · © 2026 attribution added as a second footer row, gray and small, so it doesn't crowd the nav.

Added

• Dynamic Open Graph image at src/app/opengraph-image.tsx. When the site URL is shared (iMessage, Twitter/X, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.) the preview card now shows the live Soapbox Index value, a needle bar, channel + episode counts, and the as-of date — generated at request time via next/og's ImageResponse and cached for an hour per URL. Every share becomes a data preview of the current state of alt-media discourse. Twitter card configured to use the same image via summary_large_image.

v0.6.5 · 2026-05-13

Home page UX polish and scoring-evaluation tooling.

Changed

• Home page hero copy tightened. "alt-media" → "alternative media" throughout. Subtext replaced with a sharper one-line explainer: "Soapbox is a data platform that uses language models to quantify what major alternative media is saying about US policy issues. We ingest and process new episodes daily."
• Logo trimmed. Crate dropped 36px → 32px with a tighter gap to the wordmark; the previous size felt heavy against the wordmark weight.
• "Why is the Index where it is?" moved to the home page. The per-issue contribution chart now lives directly under the hero needle/number so the explanation stays adjacent to the headline it explains. Methodology page links back to it. Window aligned to the same 7-day rolling period as the Index number above it.

Added (tooling, not user-facing)

• Independent scoring validation package. New eval/ directory with LABELING_INSTRUCTIONS.md (a 4-page methodology brief for an outside labeler) and scripts/extract-gold-set.ts (stratified sampler that emits two CSVs — a clean labeler version with channel names blinded to lean, and an internal answer key with model scores). Run with npm run eval:extract-gold-set. Designed to validate the Haiku scorer against independent human judgment; output feeds the v0.7 prompt audit.

v0.6.4 · 2026-05-13

Transcribe reliability fix. Cron's transcribe stage was burning its TRANSCRIBE_LIMIT on the freshest YouTube uploads of the day, which typically don't have auto-captions generated yet. Those failed and got marked permanently failed (no retry logic). Older pending episodes — which actually do have captions ready — were starved.

Fixed

• Transcribe order flipped to oldest-pending-first. Both src/app/api/cron/pipeline/route.ts and scripts/transcribe.ts were ordering by published_at DESC (newest first), exactly the worst order given YouTube's caption-generation latency. Flipped to ASC. Trade-off: ~24h latency between an episode being published and being transcribed, which is fine for a trailing 7-day Index aggregate.
• YT transcript errors now logged. getVideoTranscript was using bare catch { return null } which made every failure invisible. Now logs error class + message so Vercel logs tell us why a fetch fails.

Known followup (v0.7)

Failed transcripts are still permanently failed — no retry. When transcript_attempts + transcript_last_attempted_at columns are added, "failed" becomes retryable until N attempts spread over M hours. Tracked in memory under v0.7 queue.

v0.6.3 · 2026-05-12

Critical data-correctness fix: fetchScoreRows() pagination was silently dropping ~46% of sentiment_score rows in production, causing channel drill-down pages to show 0 mentions when the underlying data was present.

Fixed

• fetchScoreRows() pagination bug. The terminator condition if (data.length < pageSize) break interpreted any short Supabase page as end-of-data. Vercel's edge→Supabase route was returning short pages (response-size cap hitting before the row cap, due to the deep nested join), causing premature termination. On the live site this manifested as the prod Soapbox Index reading from 1,314 of 2,444 scores while local dev saw the full set. Channel drill-downs for recently-classified channels showed empty. Fix: terminate only on empty responses (not short ones); add explicit order("id") so pagination is deterministic; cut pageSize from 1000 to 500 to keep individual responses comfortably under any size cap; add a 50-page safety bound to prevent runaway loops.

v0.6.2 · 2026-05-12

Operational tuning: cron batch limits raised so we actually keep up with the daily ingest backlog.

Changed

• Cron batch limits raised — CLASSIFY_LIMIT 2 → 15, SCORE_LIMIT 30 → 80. Original limits would have taken ~75 days to burn down a single day's 150-episode ingest backlog. New limits target a 1-week catch-up rate while staying ~45s clear of the 300s function timeout. Stage timing observations documented inline in src/app/api/cron/pipeline/route.ts.

v0.6.1 · 2026-05-12

Same-day branding + transparency-surface polish on top of v0.6.0.

Added

• Brand identity — wooden-crate logo + red/blue soapbox wordmark (red #C8202F on "soap", blue #114A8A on "box") replacing the plain text mark. Logo source-of-truth at src/assets/logo-crate.png, served through next/image with priority + blur placeholder (~5KB delivered at retina). Favicon auto-detected from src/app/icon.png (256×256).

Changed

• Activity moved to footer — the /log link lives in the footer alongside Issues / Channels / Methodology rather than the top nav. Activity is a transparency surface, not a primary destination.
• Trust strip totals aligned with /channels SystemStats — both now report cumulative channel + episode counts rather than mixing in-window counts with all-time. "Episodes in window" → "Episodes tracked".
• .media removed from header — top-of-page brand mark is now the wordmark alone; the .media TLD was redundant next to the logo.

v0.6.0 · 2026-05-12

Post-MVP foundations release. Same-day as v0.5.0; bundled because all of this work shipped in a single extended session.

Added

• Admin tooling (Basic Auth gated via middleware against ADMIN_PASSWORD):
  • /admin/costs — Anthropic spend dashboard. Daily/weekly/monthly burn vs $1k budget cap, 30-day daily bar chart, recent-runs table. Backed by a new usage_log table written from the cron pipeline.
  • /admin/channels-audit — three views to guide channel curation: publishing cadence per show (last 14 days), L/M/R coverage gaps by issue, and "mentioned but not tracked" report scanning supporting quotes for candidate voices.
• PostHog product analytics — client-side init + manual pageview capture for the App Router. Autocapture / heatmaps / web vitals on; session recordings off.
• Public /changelog page — renders CHANGELOG.md directly via react-markdown so the file remains the single source of truth. Footer version pill links here.
• Public /log activity feed — paginated 50/page; every episode the pipeline has ingested with status badges + link to source. Receipts for transparency.
• Per-channel episode list on channel drill-down pages — last 25 episodes for that show with publish date, duration, transcript status, source link.
• External-link affordance per channel — every channel card on /channels and the drill-down page links out to YouTube or Apple Podcasts.
• Shared Header + Footer components — DRYed out the inline JSX across all pages; nav changes are now a one-line edit.
• Version surface — v0.x.y pill in every page footer linking to the on-site changelog. src/lib/version.ts is the single source of truth.

Channel curation

• Added 9 channels: Shawn Ryan Show (R), Real America's Voice / RAV (R), The Rubin Report (R), Hodgetwins (R), More Perfect Union (L), Democracy Now! (L), Heather Cox Richardson (L), Aaron Parnas (L, below 500k YT threshold but flagged for cross-platform reach), Call Me Back with Dan Senor (M).
• Pinned PodScan IDs for Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro to fix stale-feed resolution that was returning episodes from 4-10 months ago. New podscanPodcastId field on the SeedChannel schema bypasses search-based resolution for high-importance shows.
• Total channel rows: 60 (40 unique shows after grouping; ratio reflects shows tracked on both YouTube + podcast).

Changed

• Daily-cadence framing site-wide. Replaced "this week" / "weekly" copy with trailing-7-day-window language; Soapbox Index methodology refactored to use a rolling 7-day window updated daily by the cron.
• Auto-generated headline on home page below the needle, driven by the same per-issue contribution data shown on /methodology. Headline links to the contribution chart for "see why" drill-down.
• Em-dash sweep across all user-facing text. Replaced with appropriate punctuation (colons before lists, parens for asides, commas in flow). Per Gregg's site-wide style choice.
• Channels list grouped by show — same name across YouTube + podcast collapses to one card with platform indicators, eliminating the visual "duplicate channel" problem.
• Status badge clarity on activity log — "pending" renamed to "awaiting transcript" so casual visitors understand it as expected latency, not a bug.
• Hero subtext rewritten — sharper framing of why soapbox exists (alt-media now shapes US political discourse; not measured at scale; Soapbox listens above your personal algorithms).
• Issue contribution chart added to /methodology with auto-generated narrative explaining which issues are pulling left vs right.

Technical

• Vercel Cron /api/cron/pipeline endpoint runs the full pipeline at 10:00 UTC daily (6 AM ET). Writes a usage_log row at completion.
• src/middleware.ts enforces HTTP Basic Auth on /admin/*.
• Added react-markdown, @tailwindcss/typography, posthog-js.
• ARCHITECTURE.md — comprehensive live source-of-truth document. Maintained per non-trivial commit.

Vexes documented for vNext

• Cross-platform same-content duplicates: shows that publish identical content to both YouTube and podcast feeds get ingested twice. Future fix: dedup by (show + date + duration).
• Stale-feed PodScan resolution: name-search resolution can pick wrong feed when a show has changed feeds. Workaround in v0.6.0: explicit podscanPodcastId field on SeedChannel. Future fix: smart resolver that prefers the feed with most recent episodes.
• Reach is a snapshot at ingest time — need periodic re-fetch.
• Issue taxonomy fixed editorial — emergent-topic detection deferred.
• Twitch streamer ingestion still deferred.

v0.5.0 · 2026-05-12

Initial public release after the 5-day MVP sprint.

Added

• 49 hand-curated alt-media channels balanced across Left, Middle, and Right political-publishing posture.
• End-to-end pipeline: ingest (RSS + YouTube Data API), transcribe (PodScan inline + youtube-transcript for YT), classify (Claude Sonnet 4.6), score (Claude Haiku 4.5), aggregate.
• Soapbox Index: single L/R number for the trailing 7-day window of alt-media political discourse. Updated daily via Vercel Cron at 10:00 UTC (6 AM ET).
• 16-issue taxonomy with explicit left and right positions per issue (Iran-conflict added on launch day after Israel-Gaza and Trump/GOP were absorbing related content).
• Dashboard pages: home (Soapbox Index + sparkline + biggest movers + top issues), issue drill-downs, channel drill-downs.
• Methodology page with live "Why is the Index where it is?" per-issue contribution chart linkable from the home page.
• Auto-generated narrative headline below the needle driven by the same contribution data.
• System-scale stats banner on /channels showing hours of audio analyzed, words transcribed, issue mentions classified, etc.
• External "Visit on YouTube" / "Find on Apple Podcasts" link out per channel.
• Vercel Cron: full pipeline runs daily, idempotent against re-runs.

Technical foundation

• Next.js 14 (app router) + TypeScript + Tailwind + Geist sans on Vercel.
• Supabase Postgres backend with paginated reads + service-role server client.
• Claude Sonnet 4.6 for classification, Claude Haiku 4.5 for scoring.
• PodScan.fm for podcast transcripts (inline with episode metadata).
• YouTube Data API v3 + youtube-transcript npm package for YT.

Methodology disclosures

• Filter: YouTube videos under 3 minutes excluded from ingest (filters Shorts).
• Known gap: Bannon's War Room and Charlie Kirk Show (podcast feed) aren't transcribed by PodScan; metadata only.
• Classifier directional accuracy: ~85–90% at the per-row level.
• L/R position assignments per issue are editorial and reviewed quarterly.

Known limitations / vNext queue

• Channel reach is a snapshot at ingest time; needs periodic re-fetch.
• Issue taxonomy is fixed-editorial; emergent-topic detection is a v0.6+ design challenge.
• No admin tooling yet (cost dashboard, channel management); planned next.
• Episode-level transparency surfaces (per-channel episode list, public daily ingest log); planned next.