Search Console flagged four reasons on 2026-07-28: soft 404, both
duplicate-canonical variants, and noindex. All four sat on
docs.snapotter.com; the landing site was clean.
The cause was boilerplate dominance rather than a broken tag.
/tools/video/crop-video carries 1.3 KB of unique body against 3.5 KB of
identical chrome (nav, sidebar, 21-language switcher), so unrelated tool
docs measured 52-60% full-page similarity. Across 20 locales that was
3,640 of 3,822 submitted URLs. Google read the lot as one duplicate
cluster and began electing arbitrary representatives: /changelog became
the canonical for /tools/image/favicon, and /uk/guide/getting-started for
/nl/tools/image/resize. English tool docs indexed 2 of 10 and localized 4
of 10, while the landing page for those same five tools indexed 5 of 5.
Translated pages now emit `noindex, follow` with a self-canonical, and
sitemap.transformItems drops them from the sitemap. Self-canonical rather
than pointing at English, since noindex paired with a cross-canonical
sends two conflicting instructions. hreflang is removed outright: the
annotation only means something between pages that can all be indexed.
Readers see no change. The language switcher and every in-page link
behave exactly as before.
Verified against a real build: sitemap 3,822 to 182 URLs with zero
translated entries, all 3,640 translated files carrying the noindex and
no English file doing so, docs e2e 100 passed.
A release-readiness QA pass over the whole product. The commits split into
defects a user would hit and gates that were reporting green while measuring
nothing.
## Fixes that change behaviour
Rate limiting was bypassable on every install: TRUST_PROXY defaulted to true, so
request.ip came from a client-set header and a forged X-Forwarded-For got past
the login limiter. The default is now a private-network trust list.
A transient Postgres outage stranded in-flight jobs, leaving finished output on
disk with no row pointing at it. A reconciler now resolves those rows and adopts
the bytes rather than dropping the work.
A Redis connection that moved to a new address wedged every read-blocked
consumer, so completions stopped signalling while health still answered 200.
Socket timeouts plus subscriber pings recover it.
Installing more than one AI bundle left the shared venv multi-versioned and
silently broke three tools. The installer now reconciles distributions to one
version each.
Converting an image to JXL at quality 1 through 4 returned a 500, because
libjxl 0.7 rejects the distance those values compute. The quality is floored at
what the encoder honours. A missing ffmpeg was also reported to the user as a
corrupt upload; it now says the engine is unavailable.
RAW uploads reached an unpatched LibRaw on arm64, so it is built from source at
0.22.2, and the release scan was split so it can fail on an unfixed critical
instead of hiding it behind ignore-unfixed.
## Gates that could not fail
Two mutation lanes ran zero mutants because Stryker crawled the gitignored docs
build; coverage discarded its whole report on any failing test; the lint gate
skipped root tests, scripts, and two workspaces; and several generated matrices
counted a host missing ffmpeg as a passing tool. Each now measures what it
claims.
Full evidence and the outstanding release items are tracked locally and are not
part of this branch.
