The rot sampler now covers 5fish by where its redirect LANDS — a published code
goes to its numbered language page, one they do not carry is swept to /regions —
the same rule the verifier uses, with both arms proved in band. Six links a run,
ten seconds apart, because their robots.txt asks for it. That leaves 94 of 8,510
shipped links outside every re-check, down from 5,760 this morning.
YouVersion is the largest catalogue the brief names and it is now recorded as
rejected, with the measurement: nodejs.bible.com serves it without a key but its
robots.txt is Disallow: / , www.bible.com answers even robots.txt with a bot
wall, and the unauthenticated slice returns 2 English versions against the dozens
that exist — so taking it would be both discourteous and wrong. It is named in
the unchecked list on 5,413 codes instead of being silently absent, because a
reader deciding that a group has nothing is entitled to know which pools nobody
searched.
The band shipped an hour ago compared the page against an empty shell measured
at run time. It separates cleanly today, but verify-gospel-links.mjs had already
dropped that rule for this host and recorded why: their WAF began answering HEAD
with a 403 of the same size for real and bogus filesets, and the rule agreed
that everything was dead. /api/bibles/<id> answers 200 or a 75-byte 404.
Also corrects two claims in the same file. jesusfilm.org was excluded on the
strength of the retired ?languageId= shape, not the shareUrl path it ships now;
and knowgod.com is not unverifiable — Cru's API proves those pairs, the verifier
checks them that way, and this file simply has not reproduced it yet.
The rot check exempted four hosts as "never 404". Measured on the shapes the
map actually ships: jesusfilm.org does 404, and live.bible.is separates a real
page from an empty shell by better than ten times its size. That was 69% of the
corpus outside every check; it is now 13%, and the two that stay out carry the
measurement that keeps them out.
The verification table records that a URL resolved on the day it was
checked, and nothing ever re-tests one that passed. A publisher can
retire a page and this map will go on offering it indefinitely, still
labelled "link checked". Clause L guards the freshness of the record;
it cannot notice the web moving underneath it.
This samples 153 links — 25 per host at a fixed stride, so the same
run is repeatable — and today every one of them still resolves.
THE PART WORTH KEEPING is which hosts it refuses to check. Four of the
eleven never 404: jesusfilm.org, live.bible.is and knowgod.com serve
an identical shell for any path, and fivefish.org answers a nonsense
path with a plausible geo-located page at HTTP 200. Re-checking those
by status would report perfect health forever, which is worse than not
checking them, because it would look like evidence. They are verified
by publisher API or page title in the main verifier instead.
Three impossible URLs run in band every time. If one answers 2xx the
check reports PROVED NOTHING and exits non-zero rather than passing.
That mattered immediately: the first version sampled one link per host
instead of 25 and still said PASS — a green that meant almost nothing,
caught only by reading the count rather than the verdict.
