!sztuka posts a work of art, skewed 60% Polish; !wiersz posts one short
public-domain Polish poem, whole. Both follow the rule the rest of the bot
already keeps: the repository commits identifiers, and the words arrive over
the wire when somebody asks.
!wiersz was written the other way first, and the gate caught it. A pack of
short public-domain poems was harvested, name-filtered and committed, and
check_personal_data.sh refused it: three lines carried a real group member's
given name, and two still did after a filter that had discarded 31% of the
corpus. That is structural, not a tuning problem -- Polish verse capitalises
every line, so a line-initial capital carries no signal, and that is exactly
where a name sits. The pack now holds Wolne Lektury slugs; the poem, its
title and its author are fetched at post time and appear nowhere in git.
It is also the better version: with no name filter there are no false
positives, so the pool is larger and the attribution is a full name again.
The gate then refused the art category list too, over a painter whose given
name is somebody's. That is the popes.json case exactly, so it takes the
same answer: a file-scoped allowlist entry, still refused everywhere else.
The Commons harvest is now three modules by what they are, not by where the
line count fell: commons_api is the conversation with Commons, commons_harvest
turns categories into a pool of licensed page ids, commons_cache makes an
interrupted run resumable. Along the way it gained licences in the same
request that lists a category (the second pass was 1,500 requests at 2.3s
each), maxlag instead of a guessed sleep, 5xx retries because one 504 used to
destroy a whole run, and Wikidata for works by creators of Polish
citizenship: the Polish pool grew 15,221 -> 20,092.
Batching categories through CirrusSearch looked like a further 6x and was
measured out again: 2,404 files where the authoritative enumeration returns
2,429, a different ~1% missing on every run.
The offline run is 19s where it was four minutes, almost all of it the
deafness gate waiting out three thirty-second liveness probes to prove
something provable in three; the tick is configuration now, and e2e enforces
a 40s budget on itself so that never silently comes back.
The leak this repository had was not carelessness with a secret. It was
somebody reaching for a real name because it was the example in front of
them -- a fixture built from a live database, an envelope pasted out of a
running container, a help text written while looking at the actual group.
Three different people-shaped mistakes, none of which a rule about "be
careful" would have stopped.
So it is a gate. The hard part is that the thing being checked must not
contain the list of what to refuse, or the check *is* the leak. It reads the
names at run time from outside: the photo pack's manifest, the message
database, the local .env. It never prints the word it matched, because this
output reaches CI logs. On a machine with none of that private data it says
"shapes only" out loud rather than passing quietly, and CI enforces the half
that needs nothing -- phone numbers, uuids and Signal group ids, compared
against an allowlist of values invented for the fixtures.
It runs on staged files, on the commit message -- where two of the leaks
actually travelled -- and over the whole tree in CI.
It paid for itself twice before it was wired up. The live test group's id was
in tests/test_config.py in two spellings, and truncated in three more files,
after four rounds of grepping by hand had pronounced the tree clean -- nobody
thinks to grep for base64. Then it refused the commit that introduced it,
because DOCS-privacy.md had used a real name as the example of a name.
An allowlist line may be scoped to one file, which is how the given names
that are also popes stay legal in popes.json and refused in every fixture
that has no business carrying them. The threshold is three characters,
because one of this group's given names is three characters long.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017w1HZ3cZ7neL3rFdQ6VMBA
