Feature plan: Step 1 · Step 2 · Step 3 · Step 4

Debug mode: enabled

Effort study: railspike-effort / v3/activity_feed_pagination; ledger, scope v3, R1/P2.

Entry

• Approved Step 3 received; branch feat/activity-feed-pagination; scoped planning commit 347df048 verified before creating this summary or implementation edits. Original baseline 39be8293; implementation starts from e5f4bce6.

• Standard Activity is the sole adopter. Forte production code, append behavior, API contracts and preloads remain unchanged. Developer guidance at docs/reference/pagination.md is required at closeout.

• 2026-10-23 UTC; single exposed Codex rater; Step 3 projected total reaffirmed unavailable pending exact frozen R1 reference recovery. No numeric estimate, measured effort or acceptance inferred. Prior snapshots preserved; unrelated drafts/marker retained.

Stage 1 — forward navigation and reusable boundary

• Changes: standard Activity now uses an additive bounded query and native reusable pagination links/context-bound positions. Existing Forte and RSS methods are untouched. Read-model version 25 and schema documentation require normal startup recovery from version 24 before the new query.

• Verification: five focused tests passed (StandardActivityPaginationTest, version-24 startup regression and shared classic/Forte evidence rendering). Normal category-filtered links reach entries beyond the initial 100 without JavaScript; output is capped at 100. Existing Forte return shapes, append control and RSS's 100-item contract pass. ./v3 rebuild tests/fixtures/parity_minimal_v1 /tmp/activity-pagination-cli.sqlite3 passed. Syntax and whitespace checks passed.

• Notes: reverse navigation and mutation/rebuild recovery are Stage 2. Canonical action keys are stable; inspection found source-less local Codex handoff events have null keys. Their temporary local-row fallback must be guarded against reindexing in Stage 2 instead of silently assuming all rows have canonical keys. No Forte production edits or original content writes.

Stage 2 — reverse traversal and recovery

• Changes: native Previous/Next links now use record-time/key boundaries, independent of anchor existence; reverse queries restore normal display order. Invalid or context-mismatched positions show First page; deleted/empty pages retain available return navigation. Empty lists have an explicit empty state. Security-review enrichment is preserved in the new standard query.

• Verification: 15 focused pagination/retraction tests passed. A 205-item tied-time dataset traverses once and returns correctly; arrival, deleted anchor, shifted SQLite IDs and a real canonical-record rebuild preserve forward positions. Empty/deleted pages, malformed/array/cross-category positions, category reset and source-less rows have actionable recovery. Existing Forte/RSS interfaces remain covered.

• Notes: source-less local events remain included through a local-row fallback. Cursors carry a fingerprint of unkeyed local rows; a changed/reindexed local history expires that position and offers First page rather than silently skipping entries. Canonical-only lists do not depend on disposable row IDs. This is the approved stale-position recovery boundary, not historical snapshot storage. Developer guidance will document it. Native links avoid a new browser navigation/cache layer.

Stage 3 — actual serving and access

• Changes: serving regression coverage verifies existing query-sensitive static bypass and offline policy; no production routing/worker change was necessary. New standard page queries retain current retraction visibility and authenticated security evidence.

• Verification: 13 focused checks passed, including actual StaticArtifactBuilder::buildSingleRoute('/activity/') publication, Next through FrontController with/without cookies, category filtering, rejection of position-bearing static publication, unauthenticated security denial, artifact invalidation and dynamic recovery. Standard security items retain acceptance-review enrichment; withdrawn posts stay out of Visible Content. Existing full worker matrix and feature-write Activity invalidation passed.

• Notes: the offline worker does not cache Activity HTML or substitute its reader shell for Activity URLs. Uncached Activity requires reconnecting and browser Reload/Back; no all-history offline publication is promised. Worker tests explicitly fail an offline positioned request without reading unrelated cached content. Production deployment and physical devices remain outside this local stage.

Stage 4 — browser acceptance and developer guidance

• Changes: isolated canonical-record browser fixture and standard-page acceptance harness; developer guide at Implementing pagination, discoverable through CONTRIBUTING.md. The guide documents actual shared interfaces, a worked standard Activity example, data-adapter boundaries, native navigation/recovery, cursor trust, serving/access and runnable verification commands. Updated migration and UI-copy checklists; older like-startup test now asserts the current schema constant rather than hardcoding version 24.

• Verification: final focused PHP run 44/44 passed across standard paging, prior-version startup, old/new label/reaction/retraction behavior, Activity evidence/counts, incremental fallback and offline policy. Real browser passes with JavaScript disabled/enabled cover keyboard links, all page boundaries, evidence, refresh/history, category reset, invalid-position restart and native HTTP-503 Reload recovery. All 13 standard themes at 390/1280 passed actual theme/viewport assertions and long subject/path overflow checks. Word97 phone and Midnight desktop screenshots visually inspected.

• Verification: unchanged Forte production paths pass real Activity append, selection/detail for appended rows and Commits append/detail with >100 commits. Existing forte_activity_parity.mjs passed desktop/phone category loading, failure/retry, keyboard, duplicate merging, stale-response and security checks. Existing signed_reactions.mjs passed classic/Forte/QDB/guest/legacy signed-like flows, per-record Activity evidence and RSS. No Forte production file changed.

• Verification: schema-25 ./v3 rebuild and actual first-page static publication/invalidation passed in earlier stages. Guide example PHP syntax and local document links pass; changed PHP syntax, browser JavaScript execution, whitespace and stage/commit-scope checks pass. One browser-harness selector initially referenced a nonexistent commit pane; corrected to the existing commit-detail attribute, then the complete run passed.

• Notes: new UI copy is limited to Previous/Next, No activity, First page and invalid/expired-position errors. Native link recovery introduces no JavaScript paginator or extra navigation destination. Later migration decisions, including message-history behavior, remain open; Forte is explicitly unchanged.

Release boundaries

• Passed locally: normal standard Activity browsing beyond 100, bidirectional traversal, canonical-key rebuild stability, live mutation recovery, source evidence, protected access, static bypass/invalidation, shared-interface compatibility and browser/theme outcomes above.

• Unverified: production deployment, the user's live server/browser and physical devices. Tests use temporary copies/fixtures; original user content and live read model are not rewritten. Branch publication is separate from merge/deployment.

• Full suite not run: 44 focused tests are not a full-suite claim. PHP GD remains absent; the preceding cycle reproduced missing-GD image failures on unchanged application code. No new full-suite result is inferred.

• Supported limits: results are live, not frozen snapshots. Positions expire if unkeyed local history changes/reindexes; First page recovers. Offline Activity pages are not cached by the existing worker: reconnect and Reload/Back; worker policy was tested without substituting unrelated cached content. No automatic all-history offline archive or other-list migration is included.

• Deployment guidance explicitly requires refreshing existing static HTML for the new first-page controls; application/read-model updates alone do not rewrite a previously published artifact. Live deployment remains unverified.

• No schema/table-shape change beyond version-gated query semantics; no new navigation destination/icon mapping. All four stage commits include their corresponding summary updates; the planning commit contains only plans/debug history/index organization.

Study closeout

2026-10-23 UTC; railspike-effort, cycle v3/activity_feed_pagination, scope v3, original baseline 39be8293, implementation baseline e5f4bce6, single exposed Codex rater, R1/P2. Retrospective scope assessment: delivered four bounded stages for standard Activity plus reusable native controls/positions and developer guidance, preserving Forte append behavior. Numeric retrospective and projected totals remain unavailable pending exact frozen R1 calibration recovery; no replacement rating or measured effort is inferred. Verification and omissions are listed above. Maintainer comfortable-fit judgment and acceptance remain pending; prior v1–v3 snapshots and approvals are preserved, and no accepted-count increment or independent outcome is claimed.

Approved follow up — standard Activity evidence size

The user approved the short fix outline and measured outcome after the real local page revealed repeated full commit manifests. Standard Activity now renders/enriches only relevant evidence; Forte/RSS/full-commit contracts remain unchanged. The browser fixture now includes a real bulk import commit with 205 posts and 2,300 unrelated files. Local HTML fell from 88,467,387 to 257,154 bytes with identical item links and Next position; evidence rows fell from 216,057 to 258. Thirty focused PHP tests plus the core-route regression passed; real bulk-fixture 13-theme/phone/desktop/JS-disabled, signed-reaction and actual local-page browser checks passed. Existing static HTML needs republishing when deploying. This directly approved bounded fix adds no pagination migration or schema/query change; deployment/physical-device/full-suite limits remain as above.