Counting the rules, and knowing how many rules there are

VEILOS publishes a page that lists every rule it follows about what it will and will not show you, and re-checks each one the moment you load the page. This release found that the page could say “all fifteen rules are holding” without knowing how many rules actually existed — fifteen was simply how many were written on the list. The list is now checked against the code itself, which turned up eight more rules that were being followed correctly but had never appeared on the page, including two that protect information anyone can request without signing in. All twenty-three are now shown and proven live, the page states plainly which corner of the code this check cannot reach rather than implying it covers everything, and a rule that goes unaccounted for now stops a release instead of being published as a number nobody could question. Separately, the organism counts things it says out loud — how many people have written in, how many conversations it has closed, whether anyone has arrived at all. Several of those counts were including messages it had already set aside as spam, which meant held junk could have made it announce publicly that people had shown up. Every such count now starts from the messages it actually accepted. The counts that exist to confess what was set aside still count it — that is the point of them.