Approve an address BEFORE the person registers and their sign-up produces no queue row at all —
`_decide` only takes a still-pending invite — so the Access-requests screen sat empty, the tab badge
read zero, and the only working move was re-typing the address into the whitelist box. Nobody would
guess that, and on 2026-09-03 nobody did.
This is roadmap UX-25, where two earlier attempts were reverted after review. Both moved AUTHORITY:
auto-activating on registration turns a standing whitelist entry into a bearer grant for whoever
registers the address first, and reopening the approved invite to `pending` lets an anonymous sign-up
REVOKE a standing approval. What was actually missing was visibility, so this changes nothing about
what an unauthenticated caller can cause — the admin could already do exactly this by re-entering the
address; they just had no way to know they had to.
The section lists every account that cannot sign in yet and says WHICH gate is shut, because the two
dead ends look the same from the admin's chair: waiting for activation, or waiting on a confirmation
mail. Naming the unconfirmed ones is not decoration — on a no-SMTP instance that is the difference
between the owner and whoever registered the address first (SEC-15), and an admin about to let
someone in should see it. A person the queue above already covers is deliberately NOT listed here;
two buttons for one person is worse than one.
Activate is gated on `is_allowed` — the same function the sign-in paths consult, in core, so the
button that appears and the badge that counts cannot disagree. Without that gate it would
manufacture an inconsistent account: password sign-in only checks `is_active` and would let them in,
while their Google sign-in would be turned away and silently reopened as a fresh access request.
Letting in someone with no approved invite stays the whitelist box's job, which says so out loud.
The badge counts activations SEPARATELY from pending invites rather than widening an existing
field's meaning, and only counts what genuinely waits on the admin: an unconfirmed account waits on
its owner, so it is listed with a re-send but does not nag. The admin-side resend says plainly what
happened, including refusing when the instance has no working SMTP — mail is fail-soft everywhere
else, and that silence is exactly what left the 0.78.5 sign-ups with nothing to fall back on.
`send_verification_link` is now one function with three callers (registration, the public resend,
this one), so the link's shape and TTL cannot drift by who triggered it.
UAT on localdev, both languages: the UX-25 shape reproduced end to end (approve the address, then
register), the badge counting it, Activate letting them in and dropping the badge, the row losing
its Activate but keeping the re-send, a fresh token issued by the re-send, and both actions in the
audit log. Test data removed.
Three operator gaps, all found the same way — a person could not sign up and the
app showed nobody anything.
- DELETE /api/admin/invites/{id} with a delete control on both the pending
requests and the previously-decided list. Deny keeps the row so the person
cannot immediately re-ask; delete forgets the address. Refused with 409 while
a User row exists for it, because is_allowed reads that row and removing it
would revoke a live user's access with no other sign — the list ships
has_account so the UI withholds the button instead of offering one that fails.
- Email is fail-soft by design, which had come to mean invisible. _send() now
records an email_undelivered notification for every admin when a message is
skipped or rejected, naming the message that was lost, throttled to one an
hour. /api/me carries email_configured, driving a standing warning on
Configuration → Email / SMTP and above the access-request list.
- The sign-in card's Create account / Forgot password / Didn't get the email
views are history entries (useHistorySubview), so Back returns to the previous
view instead of only moving the address bar.
Also: the per-test rate-limiter reset sweeps every loaded app.* module rather
than a hand-kept list of three — this change added a limiter outside it.
Each user stores their own login cookies (Netscape cookies.txt) for an
auth-walled download host (Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, Reddit) in
Settings; a download of an auth-walled link on that host is retried with
the acting user's cookie.
Two load-bearing security controls, both in downloads.credentials as the
single source of truth so enqueue and the worker can't drift:
- cache privacy: a cookie-authed download salts its MediaAsset format_sig
with the user id, so the authed asset is private and never cache-served
to another user. The worker attaches a cookie ONLY when the asset it is
downloading into IS that private, salted identity.
- host scope (SEC-12): a cookie is resolved only for a URL whose netloc
the credential owns (netloc-scoped _host_is); a look-alike/unrelated
host gets none.
cookies_enc is Fernet-encrypted at rest, only decrypted in-worker into a
0600 file under staging/.auth/ (survives the retry wipe + _produced_file
scan) and unlinked in finally. The blob is never returned by a route,
logged, audited, or written to a job's error/snapshot. cookiefile is set
after the adapter's extra merge so an adapter can't clobber it. Settings
UI is write-only (host + set/updated only, never echoed). New
download_credentials table + migration 0074; per-user routes; HU+EN i18n.
Tests: host-scope, cache-privacy (no cross-user serve), encrypt-at-rest,
write-only API, worker attach-gate; FE dom test for the write-only field.
- scheduler _run_changed: count a run as "changed" only on a truthy NUMERIC
value — status-string no-op dicts like {"skipped":"disabled"} (Plex off, the
default) or {"skipped":"no demo account"} were flooding the trail every interval.
- audit.record: truncate target_id to the column width (128) like summary[:255],
so an over-long target (e.g. a 128+ char demo email) can't abort the mutation
the audit row is committed alongside.
- config set/reset: redact URL userinfo (user:pass@) from logged non-secret
values — a proxy setting can embed credentials that shouldn't land in the trail.
- config set: skip the audit row when a non-secret value didn't actually change
(no-op re-save shouldn't add noise); secrets are write-only so always logged.
- audit page title (pageMeta): add the missing "audit" case so the browser tab
reads "Audit log · Siftlode" instead of falling back to "Feed".
peter