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Meter anonymous Ask AI: quota gate, countdown, and sign-in wall - #436

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@JakeSCahill JakeSCahill commented Sep 9, 2026

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What

Frontend half of metering anonymous Ask AI at 3 questions per 24 hours. Backend (the endpoint and the counter) is the companion docs-site PR, linked in the first comment. Merge order does not matter for safety: this fails open when the endpoint is absent. The limit only bites once both are live.

What the visitor sees

  1. From the first question, the upsell bar counts down: "2 free questions left. Sign in for unlimited questions and the AI agent."
  2. When the budget is spent:
    • No conversation on screen: the welcome screen gives way to a hero wall ("Free with Redpanda Cloud" badge, "You've used your 3 free questions", the agent-tier pitch, Sign in to keep asking, "Or come back tomorrow.", privacy note).
    • Answers on screen: a compact footer wall replaces only the composer. Every answer they already got stays visible and scrollable.
  3. The button opens the header sign-in modal when the page has one (same as the upsell bar), otherwise navigates to /login. Carries disclosed=1 because the privacy note is inline.
  4. If sign-in is kill-switched site-wide (no login_url), no dead button: the wall says when they can ask again.

The last permitted question is the subtle case: the backend answers it with allowed: true, remaining: 0 so Kapa can still reply, so the wall goes up once that answer has finished streaming (Stop stays available until then). quotaExhausted() in anonQuota.js owns that rule.

Signed-in users are unaffected (Agent SDK path, never touches this code).

Where the gate is, and why there

persistentApiService.submitQuery consumes one question via POST /kapa/quota before calling Kapa, and refuses to call Kapa on a no. Every way to ask funnels through it (composer, chips, cards, retry, window.submitChatQuery from code blocks and the playground), so this is the one place a new entry point cannot bypass. The component also blocks pre-submit when it already knows the budget is gone, so the SDK never records a question with no answer.

Also fixed while here, on the streaming half only: pressing Stop during the quota round trip used to let the answer start streaming afterwards, and used to leave the submission pending for the client's full 4s timeout, so the SDK's own unguarded finally fired against whatever question was in flight by then. A submission counter plus a stop promise the consume is raced against.

What Stop still does not do is give the question back. The server has already been asked by the time Stop can arrive, and there is no refund, so a question stopped mid-round-trip is spent. That is the same shape as the Kapa bot-check failure below and wants a backend answer (reserve then confirm on first token, or a refund keyed to the consume) rather than a client fix.

Fails open, everywhere

Missing endpoint, timeout, degraded verdict, endpoint-level rate limit: the question goes through and no count is shown. Every verdict is published, the fail-open ones included, so a walled visitor whose next check fails gets the composer back, matching what the gate would allow. Verdicts carry a sequence number so the slow peek can never overwrite a faster consume. A 404/405 sets a sessionStorage marker so a docs-ui preview (no backend) does not pay a doomed round trip per question. The peek also warms the backend's scale-to-zero database while the user is still typing, so the consume in front of the first question does not pay the cold start.

Where the peek fires, and why not on mount

The peek is one function invocation and one Neon read, so its trigger decides whether this endpoint's traffic tracks Ask AI users or pageviews. It cannot live in ChatSdkInterface's mount effect: the drawer's root markup ships in body.hbs site-wide and AskAI.bundle.js is a plain defer script, so the React tree mounts on every pageview whether or not anyone opens Ask AI.

Peeking from there would have cost a request per anonymous pageview, which does three unwanted things. It keeps the scale-to-zero database permanently resumed instead of warming it just in time. It scales with page count rather than with people. And it spends the endpoint's per-IP flood budget on navigation: that bucket is 300 per 600s and docs-site lib/oauth/ratelimit.mjs sizes it for "a peek per drawer open plus a check per question, across everyone behind one NAT", so at a peek per pageview a large shared address can exhaust it by browsing. The consume in front of a real question then answers rate_limited, which fails open, and metering silently stops for everyone behind that address.

So schedulePeek() owns the timing, in three steps:

  1. A verdict remembered earlier in this tab session is served immediately with no request, whatever the drawer is doing. resetAt is what makes that safe in both directions, so it can raise the wall and not merely render a countdown: inside a window the server's counts only ever go up (a consume increments, nothing decrements, the window itself clears them), so a remembered verdict cannot become wrong in the reader's favour before resetAt, and past it the window no longer exists and the entry is dropped. Degraded verdicts are never cached, since "we could not get a trustworthy answer" would suppress the next real check.

Failing that:

  • Home page inline Ask AI (#kapa-chat-root): peeks on mount. Its composer is on screen with no interaction, and there is no drawer to wait for.

  • The drawer: waits for docs-chat:open, which 19-chat-panel.js and the bump widget's inline logic dispatch on a deliberate open and deliberately not on their page-load restore path. That is the same line 19-chat-panel.js already drew for the /auth/warm pre-warm, for the same reason, and its comment says so. The bump widget could not tell the two apart (its restore path called the same argument-less openPanel()), so it gets the restored flag its sibling already had.

  • A drawer that was already open when the component mounted (the page-load restore path, or a click that beat the deferred bundle) asks once, if nothing is remembered. For a reader who browses with the drawer open that is one request for the whole session, because step 0 serves every page after it.

Nothing arrives later than it did: opening the drawer and landing on the home page both precede typing, so the countdown and the wall are in place before there is a question to spend, and the database is warm ahead of the consume that gates it. Once per pageview, since a second open learns nothing and every later verdict comes from the consumes.

openPanel stamps data-opened-by on the panel as well as dispatching the event, because script order between site.js and the deferred bundle is not guaranteed and the CSS-only drawer opens on click before JS attaches; an event sent before anyone listens is lost, an attribute is not. Both kinds of open are announced, with detail.restored saying which, and that flag matters only when sessionStorage is unavailable (private browsing): there a restored open must not peek, because with nothing to cache it would repeat per pageview, and losing the countdown is the better failure.

Review round (@micheleRP)

  • Stale doQuery in window.submitChatQuery. The effect ran on [hasInteracted, isBusy], freezing exhausted in the captured closure, so a code-block "Ask AI" click could record a question the consume then refused: an orphan bubble above the wall, retry row suppressed. doQuery now lives in a ref updated after every render, and the global registers once.
  • Stop did not stop a submission awaiting its quota check. Detailed above.
  • && !exhausted on queryFailed swallowed the admitted-then-failed case. The last permitted question really is sent to Kapa, so a client-side death there deserves the normal explanation and its Heap event. Narrowed to a refused exchange.
  • Wall copy for a network-limited reader. Reads blocked_by from the companion docs-site PR and branches the title and lead sentence. Falls back to the existing copy when the field is absent, so merge order does not matter.
  • Peek fired on mount, not on drawer open. Its own section above.
  • Design note on Stop spending a question. PR text narrowed; the underlying behaviour needs the backend change described above.

Verified in the browser

Local run of both PRs together (real docs-ui bundle, Antora build, netlify dev with the quota on Blobs), counting POST /kapa/quota in the server log rather than trusting the client:

Action Requests
4 page loads across 3 URLs, drawer closed (mount confirmed each time) 0
One deliberate drawer open 1
Close and reopen on the same page 0
Two further page loads with the drawer restored open 0, wall up immediately

Also walked the full flow with Kapa answering for real: countdown 3 → 2 → "1 free question left", then the last permitted question held the wall back while it streamed with Stop still available, and replaced the composer once settled with every answer preserved. Forcing the per-network ceiling with the visitor's own budget healthy (blockedBy: "ip", remaining: 7 of 10) produced "Too many questions from this network today" rather than the old "You've used your 10 free questions".

The restored-open case in that table is the one this PR's last commit fixes; it was found by driving the UI, not by the unit tests.

Files

  • src/js/react/anonQuota.js (new): client for the endpoint, fail-open rules, docs-quota event.
  • src/js/react/persistentApiService.js: the gate.
  • src/js/react/components/ChatSdkInterface.jsx: peek scheduling, countdown copy, QuotaWall.
  • src/js/19-chat-panel.js, src/partials/chat-panel-bump.hbs: dispatch docs-chat:open on a deliberate open, not on the restore path.
  • src/css/chat-panel.css, src/css/chat-panel-bump.css: compact wall styles (hero variant reuses .signin-screen). Tokens are the themed --kapa-* set, so dark mode is covered.
  • tests/anon-quota/anon-quota.test.js (new): verdict mapping, fail-open paths, ordering, and the exhausted rule. npm run test:anon-quota, wired into validate-build.

Testing

  • gulp lint clean, drawer bundles.
  • npm run test:anon-quota: 28 tests over the real module (loaded through esbuild so it runs on CI's Node 18), covering the 200/429/404/network/rate_limited/unlimited/degraded shapes, the peek-vs-consume race, the stale-wall reset, the last-question rule, and the peek's timing (no request on mount in the drawer, one peek per deliberate open, inline mount still peeks on mount, teardown unsubscribes). The gate itself is now run rather than grepped: the service executes with only the Kapa SDK and the threadId store stubbed, asserting what actually reached Kapa (nothing on a refusal, the question on a degraded verdict, nothing after Stop). Negative controls: restoring the mount peek fails 2, dropping the once-per-pageview guard fails 1, never peeking inline fails 1, removing the Stop race fails 1, and dropping the blocked_by mapping fails 1, each the intended assertion and nothing else.
  • Existing node suites pass (signin-nudge, chat-panel-navigation, head-meta, markdown-dropdown).
  • Live browser run, local: docs-site PR 231 under netlify dev --offline (Blobs/in-memory store) serving an Antora build with this bundle. Peek showed "3 free questions left"; each question counted down (2, 1); after the third answer finished, the footer wall replaced the composer with every answer still scrollable; after a reload the peek returned 429 and the hero wall replaced the welcome screen, with the sign-in link carrying disclosed=1 and return_to, and "Or come back tomorrow." from reset_at.
  • Observed while testing, not changed here: Kapa's bot check rejected one question on localhost ("unusual activity") and that question was still charged. Retry charges again. Whether to refund a consume that never streamed a byte is a backend design call.

The anonymous Ask AI tier (Chat SDK drawer) now asks the docs backend
(docs-site POST /kapa/quota) before every question and, once the visitor's
free questions are spent, shows a sign-in wall instead of the composer.

The gate lives in persistentApiService.submitQuery because every way to ask
funnels through it: the composer, suggestion chips and cards, retry,
window.submitChatQuery from code blocks and the playground. Gating in the
component would leave each entry point to remember the check. It also
guards the Stop-during-quota-check race: without it, an answer could start
streaming after the user had already stopped it.

ChatSdkInterface peeks the budget on mount (which doubles as the warm-up
for the backend's scale-to-zero database), counts down in the upsell bar,
and renders QuotaWall in two shapes: a hero variant in place of the welcome
screen when there is no conversation to keep, and a compact footer variant
that replaces only the composer when there are answers on screen, so
nothing the reader already got is taken away. The wall reuses the agent
tier's signin-* classes and carries disclosed=1 because the privacy note is
inline.

Fails open everywhere. A missing endpoint (older site, a docs-ui preview),
a timeout, or a degraded verdict all mean the question goes through and no
count is shown. A 404/405 sets a sessionStorage marker so a build running
against a site without the function does not pay a doomed round trip per
question.
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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The change adds anonymous question quota support. A new client queries and caches quota verdicts, handles unavailable endpoints, and publishes quota events. The API service checks the quota before submitting a question and suppresses submissions stopped during the check. The chat interface displays remaining questions, reset information, and sign-in walls when the quota is exhausted. New CSS styles support hero and footer quota walls.

Priority: ➖ Normal

Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant ChatSdkInterface
  participant PersistentKapaApiService
  participant anonQuota.js
  participant QuotaEndpoint
  ChatSdkInterface->>PersistentKapaApiService: submitQuery(args, callbacks)
  PersistentKapaApiService->>anonQuota.js: consumeQuota()
  anonQuota.js->>QuotaEndpoint: POST quota request
  QuotaEndpoint-->>anonQuota.js: quota verdict
  anonQuota.js-->>PersistentKapaApiService: allowed or denied verdict
  PersistentKapaApiService-->>ChatSdkInterface: stream query or show quota error
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Merge Risk: 🟡 Moderate · up to d42a5

Anonymous Ask AI quota handling can incorrectly retain a sign-in wall, show an active composer after the free quota is spent, or reject questions during degraded quota service responses. These user-facing availability and quota-flow issues should be resolved before merge.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name Status Explanation Resolution
Docstring Coverage ⚠️ Warning Docstring coverage is 37.50% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 8 functions across 3 files. (2 skipped: 2… Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.
✅ Passed checks (4 passed)
Check name Status Explanation
Linked Issues check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Title check ✅ Passed The title clearly summarizes the primary changes: anonymous Ask AI quota metering, countdown messaging, and the sign-in wall.
Description check ✅ Passed The description directly explains the quota gate, user-visible behavior, fail-open rules, timing, testing, and implementation details.
Full details: Docstring Coverage

Explanation

Docstring coverage is 37.50% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 8 functions across 3 files. (2 skipped: 2 unsupported.)

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@JakeSCahill

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Companion docs-site PR (the endpoint this calls): https://github.com/redpanda-data/docs-site/pull/231

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Actionable comments posted: 4

Caution

Some comments are outside the diff and can’t be posted inline due to platform limitations.

⚠️ Outside diff range comments (1)
src/js/react/components/ChatSdkInterface.jsx (1)

316-316: 🎯 Functional Correctness | 🟡 Minor | ⚡ Quick win

Refresh the global submit handler when quota state changes.

The handler captures doQuery, including exhausted, but the effect does not depend on exhausted. If peekQuota() asynchronously marks an idle visitor as exhausted, the handler keeps the earlier closure and calls submitQuery instead of stopping at the quota guard. Include exhausted in the dependency list and add a regression test for this sequence.

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In `@src/js/react/components/ChatSdkInterface.jsx` at line 316, Update the effect
that installs the global submit handler to include exhausted in its dependency
list alongside hasInteracted and isBusy, so it refreshes when the quota guard
state changes. Add a regression test covering an asynchronous peekQuota
transition from idle to exhausted and verify the handler blocks submission
instead of calling submitQuery.
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only still-valid issues, skip the rest with a brief reason, keep changes
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Inline comments:
In `@src/js/react/anonQuota.js`:
- Around line 103-111: Update the quota verdict flow around ask and the announce
call so out-of-order responses cannot overwrite a newer completed consume
result: track request sequencing or completion timestamps, and ignore any
response older than the latest completed quota operation while preserving normal
field mapping for accepted responses.
- Line 47: Update openVerdict() to publish the degraded allow verdict through
announce() before returning it, ensuring timeout, 404, 405, and invalid-JSON
fallback paths emit QUOTA_EVENT and clear stale exhausted UI state.

In `@src/js/react/components/ChatSdkInterface.jsx`:
- Around line 197-199: Update the quota depletion logic around exhausted and
quotaRemaining so finite, non-degraded quotas with remaining <= 0 are treated as
exhausted even when allowed is true. Preserve unlimited and degraded handling,
and keep the Stop control available until an already accepted answer has
settled.

In `@src/js/react/persistentApiService.js`:
- Line 49: Update the verdict check in submitQuery so degraded responses are
treated as allowed: reject only when the verdict is not degraded and allowed is
false, or normalize degraded verdicts to allowed true before this check.
Preserve rejection for non-degraded disallowed verdicts.

---

Outside diff comments:
In `@src/js/react/components/ChatSdkInterface.jsx`:
- Line 316: Update the effect that installs the global submit handler to include
exhausted in its dependency list alongside hasInteracted and isBusy, so it
refreshes when the quota guard state changes. Add a regression test covering an
asynchronous peekQuota transition from idle to exhausted and verify the handler
blocks submission instead of calling submitQuery.

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  • src/css/chat-panel-bump.css
  • src/css/chat-panel.css
  • src/js/react/anonQuota.js
  • src/js/react/components/ChatSdkInterface.jsx
  • src/js/react/persistentApiService.js

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Comment thread src/js/react/anonQuota.js Outdated
Comment thread src/js/react/anonQuota.js
Comment thread src/js/react/components/ChatSdkInterface.jsx Outdated
Comment thread src/js/react/persistentApiService.js
JakeSCahill and others added 2 commits September 9, 2026 11:50
…dict, order them

- The backend answers the third of three with allowed + remaining 0 so Kapa
  can still reply. Treat that as exhausted once the answer settles, so the
  composer does not sit live under "0 free questions left" until the next
  submission is refused into an empty bubble. quotaExhausted() owns the rule.
- Fail-open verdicts are now published too, so a walled visitor whose next
  check fails gets the composer back, matching what the gate would allow.
- Verdicts carry a sequence number; the slow mount-time peek can no longer
  overwrite a faster consume.
- Degraded verdicts are pinned to allowed at the boundary.
- Drop the unused isExhausted export.
- tests/anon-quota: node --test suite over the real module, wired into
  validate-build.
Resolves the additive conflict in package.json and validate-build.yml
where both this branch and the collapsible-TOC release (#433) register
a new node test script and CI step at the same spot. Both are kept.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>

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The gate location (persistentApiService.submitQuery) is the right choke point and the fail-open rules are thorough. I merged v4.1.0 main into the branch (the conflict was only the test registration in package.json and the workflow; both entries kept, tests and lint pass).

Four things I'd fix before merge, one wall-copy item that pairs with a comment on docs-site #231, and one design note, all inline.

useEffect(() => {
const onQuota = (e) => setQuota(e.detail)
window.addEventListener(QUOTA_EVENT, onQuota)
peekQuota().catch(() => {}) // fails open inside; nothing to handle here

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Should fix. This peek runs in a mount effect, and the component mounts on every anonymous pageview, not on drawer open: chat-panel is in body.hbs unconditionally, AskAI.jsx calls createRoot(…).render() on DOMContentLoaded, and drawer open/close is CSS-only. So every page load costs a function invocation, two strong-consistency Blobs ops, and one or two Neon queries; Neon can never scale to zero while anyone is browsing; and the endpoint flood guard (sized in ratelimit.mjs for a peek per drawer open) trips on ordinary browsing behind a shared IP. Once it trips, kapa-quota returns rate_limited for peeks and consumes from that IP for the rest of the window, anonQuota.js maps that to openVerdict(), and everyone behind that NAT asks uncounted. The PR text's "peek on drawer mount… while the user is still typing" describes the intent, not what runs.

Suggest hanging the peek off the existing docs-account:warm / openPanel hook (which already fires only on deliberate opens) and caching the verdict in sessionStorage until reset_at, the way probeSession caches kapa-session-state.

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Fixed, and you were right about the mechanism end to end. Two deviations worth flagging.

I used a dedicated docs-chat:open rather than docs-account:warm. That event is gated on !/rp_docs_auth=1/, so a reader carrying a stale auth cookie with an expired session lands on the anonymous drawer and would never have got a peek, and so never a countdown. The new event fires on the same !restored condition, just without the cookie test. The bump widget could not tell restore from a deliberate open at all (its restore path called the same argument-less openPanel()), so it now takes the restored flag its sibling already had.

The home page's inline Ask AI still peeks on mount: #kapa-chat-root has no drawer to wait for, and its composer is on screen immediately. schedulePeek() reads the data-mounted marker AskAI.jsx already stamps on whichever element it chose, so that check follows the real mount decision rather than re-deriving it.

I did not add the sessionStorage caching. With the peek down to once per deliberate open, it saves a request only for someone who opens the drawer on several pages in one session, and a cached verdict can go stale against a consume from another tab, which is the direction that shows a wall to someone who has questions left. Happy to add it if you still want it, but it seemed worth you weighing that first.

Five tests, and the negative controls: restoring the mount peek fails 2, dropping the once-per-pageview guard fails 1, never peeking inline fails 1.

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Reversing myself on the sessionStorage half: you were right, and it is now in.

Driving the real UI showed what the gate alone had opened up. A reader who browses with the drawer already open never opens it again, so restoreState() calls openPanel(true), the gate correctly ignores it, and nothing else fires. No countdown and no wall until a question was refused. Metering was intact, but the "wall is up before you type" property was gone for exactly the readers most likely to be out. Neither the unit tests nor my reasoning caught it; only clicking through it did.

Your suggestion plus the gate is better than either alone. The gate stops the per-pageview request; the cache covers what the gate opened up. schedulePeek now serves a remembered verdict with no request at all, and only asks when there is nothing remembered and the composer is already on screen, which for a keep-open reader is one request per session rather than one per pageview.

One thing I got wrong in my own reasoning and want to flag, since it is the part that decides whether the cache may raise a wall. I had assumed a cached verdict was only safe for the countdown, never for walling, because a stale wall is the harmful direction. That is too cautious: resetAt makes it safe both ways. Inside a window the server's counts only ever go up, since a consume increments, nothing decrements, and the window itself is what clears them. So a remembered verdict cannot become wrong in the reader's favour before resetAt, and past it the window no longer exists and the entry is discarded. That is why the wall now renders from cache.

Degraded verdicts are never cached, since "we could not get a trustworthy answer" would suppress the next real check for the session. Unlimited ones are not either, though a signed-in reader never renders this drawer anyway.

The remaining hole is private browsing, where sessionStorage throws. There a restored open deliberately does NOT peek: with nothing to cache it would repeat per pageview, so losing the countdown is the better failure. openPanel now sends detail.restored so the client can make that distinction, and also stamps data-opened-by on the panel, because script order between site.js and the deferred bundle is not guaranteed and a reader can click the CSS-only drawer open before JS attaches. An event sent before anyone listens is lost; an attribute is not.

28 tests now. Negative controls fail only their own assertions. Worth noting one of them initially passed for the wrong reason: the client-side fail-open verdict carries no resetAt, so it was being rejected by that condition rather than the degraded one, and the test proved nothing until I switched it to the server's degraded shape.

// authoritative check). Stopping here keeps the SDK from recording a
// question that never gets an answer, which would leave an empty bubble
// sitting above the wall.
if (exhausted) {

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Should fix. This early return is correct, but the effect that publishes window.submitChatQuery (around L308–318) still has deps [hasInteracted, isBusy], so the code-block and playground "Ask AI" entry point holds a doQuery whose exhausted is frozen at mount. Scenario: a visitor who spent all 3 yesterday loads a page; the effect captures exhausted=false; the peek returns 429 and the hero wall renders; neither dep changed so the effect doesn't re-run; a click on a code block's "Ask AI" skips this gate, fires ADD_NEW_QA and the Heap event, the consume is refused, and you get an orphan question with no bubble above the footer wall (the retry row is suppressed by !exhausted). The reverse also holds after a fail-open verdict flips it back. Add exhausted to the deps, or read the latest doQuery through a ref.

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Fixed. doQuery now lives in a ref updated after every render, and the global registers once with [], so there is no dep list to keep in step and no next captured value to forget. Adding exhausted to the old list would have worked today and left the same trap for whatever doQuery closes over next.

* Forward abort to default service, and remember it for any submission whose
* quota check hasn't resolved yet (see submitQuery).
*/
abortCurrent () {

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Should fix. abortCurrent() records abortedSubmission and forwards to the default service, but never cancels this wrapper's own pending step: the consumeQuota() await, whose AbortController is local to ask(). So a stopped submission's promise stays pending for up to 4s, and the SDK's unconditional finally { SET_IS_GENERATING false } (dist/index.mjs around L883–901, no request-id guard) fires late and clears both busy flags for whatever submission is in flight by then. Reachable via Stop then "Try again" within one round trip: #1 awaiting consume, Stop, Try again, #2 ADD_NEW_QA, #1's consume resolves, SDK #1 finally runs while #2 is preparing or streaming. Effects: composer re-enabled and Stop replaced mid-stream, a false "No answer came back" under an in-flight question, and the wall replacing the composer mid-stream if #2 was the last permitted question. The baseline DefaultKapaApiService never has this because its fetch rejects with AbortError in the same tick.

Suggest racing the consume against a per-submission abort promise that abortCurrent() resolves (and not announcing a degraded verdict on external abort).

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Fixed. The consume is now raced against a per-submission stop promise that abortCurrent() resolves, so a stopped submission settles at once instead of waiting out the 4s timeout and letting the SDK's unguarded finally land on whatever is in flight by then.

On your parenthetical: I chose not to abort the consume's fetch, so there is no external-abort verdict to suppress. The server has already been asked by the time Stop can arrive, so the question is spent either way, and letting the request finish means its real verdict reaches the countdown. Aborting it would publish a degraded verdict and tell the reader they have a question they do not.

Tested by running the service with the SDK stubbed and a fetch that never resolves: abortCurrent() then awaiting the submission has to return, and nothing may reach Kapa. Raced against a 500ms deadline in the test so a regression fails fast rather than hanging the run. Removing the race fails that test alone.

// answer, and "the browser check may still be loading" would be a wrong and
// confusing explanation for "you're out of free questions". The wall below
// is that exchange's explanation.
const queryFailed = !isBusy && Boolean(latestQA?.question) && !latestQA?.answer && !exhausted

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Should fix. Adding && !exhausted here also swallows the admitted-then-failed case: the visitor's last permitted question (server says allowed: true, remaining: 0) fails at Kapa, and instead of "No answer came back" they get a bare question, no bubble, no explanation, and the composer replaced by a wall whose copy implies the question was answered. The chat_error_docs_home Heap event is suppressed too. The code's own comment calls the captcha abort the most common failure, so a third of those for walled visitors land here. Retry would be refused anyway, so the gap is the explanation and the observability, not the button. Narrower condition: exclude only quota?.allowed === false (the refused exchange the comment targets).

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Fixed, narrowed to quota?.allowed === false as you suggested. The last permitted question really was admitted and really was sent to Kapa, so a client-side death there now gets the normal explanation and its chat_error_docs_home event, and only the refused exchange is left to the wall.

const title = quota?.limit === 1
? 'That was your free question'
: quota?.limit
? `You've used your ${quota.limit} free questions`

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Pairs with a comment on docs-site #231. When the per-IP ceiling (30/day) refuses, the backend's 429 currently reports the visitor's budget and drops the reason, so this title tells someone who asked zero questions "You've used your 3 free questions". Once the 429 carries blocked_by, branch the title here ("Too many questions from your network today"); reset_at already gives the right "come back in N hours" line.

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Done on both sides. docs-site PR 231 now sends blocked_by on the 429, and the wall branches the title to "Too many questions from this network today" plus a lead sentence saying the limit is per network. reset_at carries the IP window already, so the "come back in N hours" line needed nothing.

It falls back to the existing copy when the field is absent, so merge order between the two does not matter.

Comment thread src/js/react/persistentApiService.js Outdated
// Consume one question. Fails open (see anonQuota.js): a missing or broken
// endpoint returns allowed, so the docs AI never goes dark because the
// counter is unavailable.
const verdict = await consumeQuota()

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Design note, not blocking. await consumeQuota() runs (and the server increments n) before the Stop check at L58, so a Stop pressed during the 0–4s quota round trip still spends one of the visitor's three questions with no answer delivered, and then walls them if it was the last one. Moving the check up is a no-op since Stop can only arrive during the await, and no refund exists. This is the same class as the Kapa bot-check case you already flagged in the description, so it probably wants a backend answer (reserve/confirm-on-first-token, or a refund keyed to the consume). At minimum I'd narrow the "fixed while here" Stop claim in the PR text to the streaming half.

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Narrowed the PR text as you asked: the Stop claim now says the streaming half only, and states plainly that a question stopped mid-round-trip is still spent, with the reserve-then-confirm or refund options named as the backend answer alongside the Kapa bot-check case.

Worth noting the two are not quite the same size now. The unstopped-submission half of that thread turned out to be a live bug rather than a design gap, and is fixed above.

JakeSCahill and others added 2 commits September 9, 2026 21:04
The peek fired from ChatSdkInterface's mount effect, and that component mounts
on every pageview: the drawer's root markup ships in body.hbs site-wide and
AskAI.bundle.js is a plain defer script, so the React tree goes up whether or
not anyone ever opens Ask AI. Every anonymous pageview therefore cost a function
invocation and a Neon read before the reader had shown any interest in asking a
question.

Three things went wrong with that:

- It kept the scale-to-zero database permanently resumed rather than warming it
  just in time, which is the opposite of what the warm-up is for.
- It scaled with page count instead of with people, so the endpoint's traffic
  said nothing about Ask AI usage.
- It spent the per-IP flood budget on navigation. That bucket is 300 per 600s
  and docs-site lib/oauth/ratelimit.mjs sizes it for "a peek per drawer open
  plus a check per question, across everyone behind one NAT"; at a peek per
  pageview a large shared address can exhaust it by browsing. The consume in
  front of a real question then answers rate_limited, which fails open, so the
  countdown silently disappears and metering stops for everyone behind that
  address. That is the population it should work for most.

schedulePeek() now owns the timing. On the docs home page's inline Ask AI,
whose composer is on screen with no interaction, it peeks on mount as before.
In the drawer it waits for docs-chat:open, which 19-chat-panel.js and the bump
widget's inline logic dispatch on a deliberate open and not on their page-load
restore path. That is the same line 19-chat-panel already drew for the
/auth/warm pre-warm, for the same reason, and its comment says so.

The bump widget could not tell the two apart, since its restore path called the
same argument-less openPanel(), so it gets the `restored` flag its sibling
already had.

Nothing arrives later than before: opening the drawer and landing on the home
page both precede typing, so the countdown and the wall are still in place
before there is a question to spend, and the database is still warm ahead of the
consume that gates it. Once per pageview, since a second open learns nothing
and every later verdict comes from the consumes.

Tests: 5 new in tests/anon-quota (no request on mount, one peek on open, not
twice, inline mount still peeks on mount, teardown unsubscribes), and the fake
browser now registers and fires listeners for real rather than stubbing
addEventListener. Negative controls: restoring the mount peek fails 2, dropping
the once-per-pageview guard fails 1, and never peeking inline fails 1, each the
intended assertion and nothing else.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
…wall copy

Four fixes from @micheleRP's review of PR 436.

**window.submitChatQuery held a stale doQuery.** The effect publishing the
global ran on [hasInteracted, isBusy], so the doQuery it captured froze
`exhausted` at whatever it was when those last changed. A reader who spent
their questions on a previous day loaded a page, the peek returned 429 and
raised the wall, neither dep changed, and a code-block "Ask AI" click still
went through with exhausted frozen false: the SDK recorded a question, the
consume refused it, and the result was an orphan bubble above the wall with the
retry row suppressed. The same staleness ran the other way after a fail-open
verdict. doQuery now lives in a ref updated after every render, and the global
is registered once, so there is no next captured value to forget.

**Stop did not stop a submission waiting on its quota check.** abortCurrent
recorded the submission and forwarded to the default service, but the wrapper's
own pending await was consumeQuota, whose AbortController is internal to
anonQuota.js. So a stopped submission stayed pending for the client's full 4s
timeout, and the SDK's unconditional finally (no request-id guard) then fired
against whatever was in flight by then: Stop, "Try again", and #1's late finally
re-enables the composer and swaps out Stop mid-stream, or reports "No answer
came back" under a live question, or drops the wall over #2 if that was the last
permitted one. The consume is now raced against a per-submission stop promise
that abortCurrent resolves.

The consume itself is deliberately not cancelled: the server has already been
asked by the time Stop can arrive, so the question is spent either way, and
letting it finish means its real verdict reaches the countdown where aborting
the fetch would publish a degraded one and tell the reader they have a question
they do not.

**`&& !exhausted` on queryFailed swallowed too much.** It also covered the last
permitted question (allowed, remaining 0), which was admitted and really was
sent to Kapa. When that one dies client-side the reader got a bare question, no
bubble, no explanation, and a wall whose copy implies it was answered, and the
chat_error_docs_home event was suppressed with it. Narrowed to a refused
exchange, which is the only one the wall actually explains.

**The wall told network-limited readers they had spent their own questions.**
The 429's counts are always the visitor's, so someone refused by the shared
per-IP ceiling saw "You've used your 3 free questions" having used one. Reads
blocked_by (added in the companion docs-site PR) and branches the title and the
lead sentence; reset_at already produced the right "come back in N hours" line.
Falls back to the old copy when the field is absent, so it does not depend on
merge order.

Also replaced the gate test that asserted `if (!verdict.allowed)` by regex over
the source. It broke on the restructure above, and a regex over source cannot
tell whether the gate works. The service now runs in the test with only the
Kapa SDK and the threadId store stubbed, asserting what actually reached Kapa:
nothing on a refusal, the question on a degraded verdict, and nothing after
Stop, that last one racing a deadline so a regression fails fast instead of
hanging the run.

Tests: 20 in tests/anon-quota, up from 16. Negative controls: removing the Stop
race fails the Stop test alone, and dropping the blocked_by mapping fails the
wall-copy test alone. The two React-component fixes have no component test
harness here and were verified by build and by reading the render paths.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

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Re-reviewed at 7f23d10. All six threads are addressed, and the 20 anon-quota tests pass locally. Specifics I checked beyond the replies: data-mounted is stamped synchronously in AskAI.jsx before render(), so mountedInline() is reliable; the countdown bar sits behind !exhausted, so a network-refused reader with remaining: 2 does not see "2 free questions left" beside the wall; and the blocked_by fallback means merge order with docs-site #231 is free. Declining the sessionStorage cache is fine by me; the stale-across-tabs direction is the worse one.

One new item, non-blocking, and a copy nit.

Deliberate open before mount loses the peek. ChatSdkInterface mounts only after App's session probe resolves; until then AskAI.jsx renders the chat-tier-loading spinner, and on the first pageview of a session that probe is a real round trip. openPanel() dispatches docs-chat:open synchronously on click and nothing latches it, so a reader who clicks Ask AI while the spinner is up dispatches to no listener, and schedulePeek() then subscribes to an event that has already fired. openChatWithQuery has the same shape: it already expects the component to be absent (it polls for submitChatQuery for up to 8s) but its openPanel() fires the event immediately. The gate still holds, so the cost is no countdown and no pre-rendered hero wall until the first consume, plus one orphan refused question for an already-walled reader. It is the eager first-visit case the peek exists for, and the database is cold there too. Suggest latching it: in both openPanel(restored) implementations set a flag when restored is false (for example chatPanel.dataset.opened = 'true'), and have schedulePeek() fire at once if the flag is already set before subscribing. One test: dispatch the open, then call schedulePeek(), assert one peek. Happy for this to be a follow-up.

Copy nit. "Anonymous questions are limited per network, and this one has reached today's." reads better as "and this network has reached today's limit."

Approving.

JakeSCahill and others added 2 commits September 10, 2026 08:35
…ll shows it

Gating the peek on a deliberate open left one group behind, which only showed up
when driving the real UI: a reader who browses with the drawer already open
never opens it again, so `restoreState()` calls `openPanel(true)`, the gate
correctly ignores it, and nothing else fires. They saw no countdown and no wall
until a question was refused. Metering was intact, but the "wall is up before
you type" property the peek exists for was gone for exactly the readers most
likely to be out of questions.

This is @micheleRP's sessionStorage suggestion, which I had pushed back on. Her
version plus the gate is better than either alone: the gate stops the
per-pageview request, and the cache covers the case the gate opened up.

`schedulePeek` now decides in three steps:

1. A remembered verdict is served immediately, with no request, whatever the
   drawer is doing. This is what gives a restored-open drawer its countdown.
2. Otherwise, if the composer is already on screen (the home page's inline
   chat, or a drawer already open when we mounted), ask now. For a keep-open
   reader that is one request for the whole session, because step 1 serves
   every page after it.
3. Otherwise wait for `docs-chat:open`, as before.

`resetAt` is what makes a remembered verdict safe to trust in BOTH directions,
which is why the cache can raise the wall and not just render a countdown.
Inside a window the server's counts only ever go up: a consume increments,
nothing decrements, and the window itself is what clears them. So a remembered
verdict cannot become wrong in the reader's favour before `resetAt`, and past it
it describes a window that no longer exists and is discarded. Degraded verdicts
are never cached ("we don't know" would suppress the next real check), nor are
unlimited ones (a signed-in reader never renders this drawer).

Two robustness details:

- `openPanel` now records `data-opened-by` on the panel as well as dispatching,
  because script order between site.js and the deferred AskAI bundle is not
  guaranteed and a reader can click the CSS-only drawer open before JS attaches.
  An event sent before anyone listens is lost; an attribute is not.
- Both kinds of open are announced now, with `detail.restored` saying which.
  The flag matters only when sessionStorage is unavailable (private browsing):
  there a restored open must not peek, because with nothing to cache it would
  repeat per pageview. Losing the countdown is the better failure.

Verified in the browser, which is the only place the original gap was visible:
fresh session with the drawer closed makes no request; a deliberate open makes
exactly one and caches it; then two further page loads with the drawer restored
open put the wall up immediately, composer replaced, with the server-side count
of POST /kapa/quota unmoved at 2.

Tests: 28 in tests/anon-quota, up from 20. Negative controls, each failing only
its own assertions: removing the cache read fails 3, removing the no-storage
guard fails 1, removing the pre-mount check fails 4, removing the resetAt expiry
check fails 1, and caching degraded verdicts fails 1. That last test initially
passed for the wrong reason (the client-side fail-open verdict has no resetAt,
so it was rejected by the wrong condition) and now uses the server's degraded
shape, which does carry one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Found while checking whether any of this can affect signed-in readers. It
mostly cannot: persistentApiService, the only caller of the quota endpoint, is
wired solely into the anonymous branch, and the endpoint short-circuits a
recognized session before it reaches either limiter. But the session cache added
one narrow interaction.

The wall exists to funnel readers into signing in, and sessionStorage survives
the OAuth round trip in the same tab. So a reader who hit the wall, signed in,
and came back still had "you're out" remembered. Normally harmless, because they
now get the agent drawer, which never reads it. If the tier probe misreads them
as anonymous though -- a flaky /auth/me, a cold start -- they get the anonymous
drawer, schedulePeek serves that stale refusal from cache, and no request is
made to correct it. Before the cache that path made a peek, which would have
come back `unlimited` and cleared the wall.

It self-heals as soon as they try to ask, since the consume returns unlimited
and republishes, but the wall should not greet someone immediately after they
did the thing it asked for.

forgetQuota() drops the snapshot and the cached entry, called from both places
the drawer starts a sign-in: the wall's button and the countdown bar's link.

Tests: 29, up from 28. Leaving the cache in place fails the new one alone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

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Re-approving at c77da22. Both commits since 7f23d10 check out, and dd122d1 delivers the open-before-mount latch I asked for at approval almost verbatim: both openPanel implementations stamp data-opened-by and send detail.restored, restoreState passes the flag in both, openChatWithQuery goes through openPanel so it gets the attribute too, and the scheduler reads the attribute before subscribing.

Cache: the reversal is the right call, and the safety argument holds. Only verdicts with a resetAt are stored, degraded and unlimited never, expired ones are discarded, and forgetQuota clears it on the sign-in click from both the wall and the upsell bar. Inside a window the counts only rise, so a remembered verdict can be stale only in the reader's favour, and the consume in front of the next question corrects that. The component adds its QUOTA_EVENT listener before calling schedulePeek, so the synchronous announce from cache is received. The private-browsing rule (a restored open with no storage does not peek) is the right failure to choose.

29 anon-quota tests pass locally on c77da22. CI green.

Two nits, neither blocking:

  1. The copy nit from my approval was not taken: ChatSdkInterface.jsx:88 still reads "and this one has reached today's." Suggested: "and this network has reached today's limit."
  2. ChatSdkInterface.jsx:422-423, the two lines added inside the upsell bar's onClick, are indented 4 spaces where 14 are expected; eslint's indent rule flags exactly those two. CI cannot see it because the gulp lint glob is src/{helpers,js}/**/*.js, so the .jsx components are never linted. Worth a separate small PR to add .jsx to the glob; not a condition here.

Unaffected by my request-changes on docs-site 231: the client branches on blocked_by, whose meaning did not change, and this fails open without the endpoint, so it can merge first.

JakeSCahill and others added 5 commits September 11, 2026 11:01
# Conflicts:
#	package.json
#	src/js/react/components/ChatSdkInterface.jsx
#	src/js/react/persistentApiService.js
The merge of main gave persistentApiService.js a wrapScopeFallback import.
makeService stubs that module boundary, so the unstubbed request fell through
to the real kapaScope.js, and require() cannot read ESM before Node 22: the
three tests that build the service failed under CI's Node 18 with "Unexpected
token 'export'" while passing locally on 22.

A pass-through matches the real wrapScopeFallback for these queries, none of
which send sourceGroupIDsInclude.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
…ng them

The kapaScope stub fixed the immediate break, but the stub map was also the
only thing standing between the fixture and a require() of ESM source. Any
import added to persistentApiService.js that no test happens to stub fell
through to the CJS loader, which cannot read ESM before Node 22 while CI runs
18, and surfaced as a bare "Unexpected token 'export'" pointing at the loader
rather than at the import.

Relative siblings now go through the same esbuild transpile as the module under
test, so the stub map lists only what a test wants to replace. The kapaScope
stub stays: it is a deliberate behavioural pass-through, not a loader
workaround.

Verified on Node 20 (pre-require(esm), same class as CI's 18) and Node 22:
29/29 both. Removing the kapaScope stub entirely still passes on Node 20,
which is what shows the fallthrough is doing the work.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both conflicts were additive registrations, the test script list and the
workflow step list, and both sides are kept.

One thing fixed while resolving: main carries TWO "test:all" keys in
package.json, from two branches that each appended their own. JSON takes the
last, so the first was dead and test:tooltip-touch and test:tooltip-single-open
never ran under test:all. Collapsed into a single key covering all 17 suites.
The companion docs-site change gates the visitor cookie on the reader's
OneTrust answer. sessionStorage is storage on their device under the same rule,
and this module writes two keys to it (the cached verdict and the 404 marker),
so gating only the cookie would have kept the promise by halves. Both writes,
and canRemember's probe, now check the granted groups first.

DOCS_ANON_ASK_CONSENT_GROUP mirrors the backend variable, and unset means no
gate on both sides, so neither half starts enforcing before the consent
manager's category is known. A missing OnetrustActiveGroups is not a refusal:
OneTrust arrives through the tag manager, so a blocked extension leaves the
global absent entirely, and the backend takes the same view of a missing
signal.

A reader can also change their mind without reloading, so OneTrustGroupsUpdated
now drops anything we remembered under the old answer. The cookie itself is
expired by the endpoint on the next request.

The wall's network branch covers blocked_by: 'noconsent' as well as 'ip'. Both
are budgets shared per address, so the copy is right for both; without it a
reader metered by address would be told they had used their 3 free questions
when they never had three.

Michele's two open nits, from the second approval: the wall copy now reads "and
this network has reached today's limit", and the two lines in the upsell bar's
onClick are indented to match the rest of the block.

Also fixed: main's new lazy-askai suite stubs a panel element with no dataset,
and this branch's openPanel stamps data-opened-by on it, so three of its tests
broke on the merge with "Cannot set properties of undefined". The fake was
incomplete rather than the code wrong, since every real element has a dataset
and the sibling root stub in the same helper already had one.

7 new tests, 36 in the quota suite. Negative control: making the consent check
always allow fails 3. All 15 node suites: 207 passed, 0 failed, gulp lint clean.
@JakeSCahill

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@micheleRP both nits from your second approval are taken in d90e801: the wall copy now reads "and this network has reached today's limit", and the two lines in the upsell bar's onClick are indented to match the block. The lint glob still does not cover .jsx, so CI still cannot see that class of thing; worth its own small PR as you said.

Also in this push, and it re-opens your area:

  • Cookie consent now gates client storage too. The companion docs-site change gates the visitor cookie on the reader's OneTrust answer. sessionStorage is storage on their device under the same rule, and this module writes two keys to it (the cached verdict and the 404 marker), so gating only the cookie would have kept the promise by halves. Both writes and canRemember's probe check the granted groups first, and OneTrustGroupsUpdated drops anything remembered under a withdrawn answer. A missing OnetrustActiveGroups is not treated as a refusal: OneTrust arrives through the tag manager, so a blocked extension leaves the global absent entirely, and the backend takes the same view of a missing signal. Unset group means no gate on both sides.
  • The wall's network branch covers blocked_by: 'noconsent'. A reader we may not store a cookie for is metered by address instead, so that refusal is network-shaped like 'ip'. Without the branch they would be told they had used their 3 free questions when they never had three.
  • Fixed a merge break in main's new lazy-askai suite. It stubs a panel element with no dataset, and this branch's openPanel stamps data-opened-by on it, so three of its tests failed with "Cannot set properties of undefined". Fixed the fake rather than the code: every real element has a dataset, and the sibling root stub in the same helper already had one.
  • main's package.json had two "test:all" keys, from two branches that each appended their own. JSON takes the last, so test:tooltip-touch and test:tooltip-single-open never ran under it. Collapsed into one key covering all 17 suites, which is why the workflow diff looks bigger than the merge.

7 new tests, 36 in the quota suite. Negative control: making the consent check always allow fails 3. All 15 node suites: 207 passed, 0 failed, gulp lint clean.

A second review found that the gate added in d90e801 could never fire. It read
`window.DOCS_ANON_ASK_CONSENT_GROUP`, and nothing in either repo has ever
published that global: the backend reads the category from its own environment
and never told the page. So `mayRemember()` always returned true and every
write went through. A gate that looks fitted and holds nothing, which is the
failure this pair of modules keeps having to design against.

The category cannot be decided here, so the ANSWER now travels with the verdict
instead: the endpoint sends `storage_allowed` on every response and this module
obeys it. Absent, as on an older deploy, means allow, matching the endpoint's
own posture of not enforcing until it is configured.

Four more things the same review found:

- The READ path was not gated at all, and the listener cannot cover it: the
  listener only exists once this lazy bundle has loaded, and by then step 0 of
  schedulePeek has already served the cache. Verified by executing it: a refusal
  cached while the category was granted came straight back out and was
  republished on the next pageview. The cache now carries a fingerprint of the
  consent answer it was written under and is dropped when that changes, which
  also covers a grant arriving as well as a withdrawal.
- `forgetQuota()` left `docs-quota-absent` behind. That marker does the most
  damage of the two if it outlives its reason, because while it is set every
  question skips the endpoint entirely.
- Withdrawing consent forgot the verdict but published nothing, so a walled
  reader kept the wall with no composer and no way to re-check until they
  navigated. It now re-asks, which also corrects a reader who has just granted.
  The listener is unconditional, since the new answer may be a grant and either
  way what we hold was written under the old one.
- The client's own three-state guess diverged from the endpoint's: "group not
  listed" and "banner not answered" were refusals here and unknown there. Gone
  with the group parsing, along with an untrimmed comparison the backend trims.

Left alone deliberately: `test:all` and the CI step list drift in both
directions on main (markdown-dropdown runs in CI but is not in `test:all`,
head-meta is in `test:all` which no workflow runs). Pre-existing and not this
branch's to fix.

36 tests in the quota suite. Negative controls: always allowing storage fails 2,
ignoring the cache fingerprint fails 1, skipping the marker on forget fails 1,
dropping the re-ask fails 1. All 16 node suites: 222 passed, gulp lint clean.
@JakeSCahill

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Second review round, in 3320830. One of these is mine from this morning and is the one worth knowing about.

The consent gate added in d90e801 could never fire. It read window.DOCS_ANON_ASK_CONSENT_GROUP, and nothing in either repo has ever published that global: the backend reads the category from its own environment and never told the page. So the check always returned true and every sessionStorage write went through, which is a gate that looks fitted and holds nothing.

The category cannot be decided in this bundle, so the answer now travels with the verdict: docs-site sends storage_allowed on every response and this module obeys it. Absent, as on an older deploy, means allow, matching the endpoint's own posture of not enforcing until it is configured.

Three more, each reproduced by executing the module first:

  • The read path was not gated at all, and the listener cannot cover it: it only exists once this lazy bundle has loaded, and by then step 0 of schedulePeek has already served the cache. A refusal cached while the category was granted came straight back out and was republished on the next pageview. The cache now carries a fingerprint of the consent answer it was written under and is dropped when that changes, which covers a grant arriving as well as a withdrawal, and works whether or not the listener exists yet.
  • forgetQuota() left docs-quota-absent behind. That marker does the most damage of the two if it outlives its reason, because while it is set every question skips the endpoint entirely.
  • Withdrawing consent published nothing, so a walled reader kept the wall with no composer and no way to re-check until they navigated. It now re-asks, which also corrects a reader who has just granted. The listener is unconditional for that reason.

Also gone: the client's own three-state consent guess, which diverged from the endpoint's ("group not listed" and "banner not answered" were refusals here, unknown there), along with an untrimmed group comparison the backend trims.

Left alone deliberately: test:all and the CI step list drift in both directions on main. markdown-dropdown runs in CI but is not in test:all; head-meta is in test:all, which no workflow runs. Pre-existing, and not this branch's to fix, but worth a two-line PR alongside the .jsx lint glob.

36 tests in the quota suite. Negative controls: always allowing storage fails 2, ignoring the cache fingerprint fails 1, skipping the marker on forget fails 1, dropping the re-ask fails 1. All 16 node suites: 222 passed, gulp lint clean.

Jake asked what the storage decision does when someone declines, and the
honest answer for this one write was "nothing, because it cannot know". A
404/405 means there is no verdict, so there is no consent answer to consult,
and the previous commit wrote a sessionStorage key anyway with a comment
explaining that no cookie was being set either. That explains why there is no
COOKIE; it does not justify writing to their device.

In memory instead. It still does its job, which is not paying a doomed round
trip per question within a pageview. What it loses is surviving navigation, so
the cost is one wasted request per pageview, and only on a deploy that has no
endpoint at all: previews, older builds, local gulp against production. On a
deploy that has the endpoint this path never runs.

Two existing tests asserted the device write, which was the behaviour rather
than the requirement, so they now assert what actually matters: nothing is
written, and the endpoint is not asked twice. The network-failure test was
asserting the absence of a key that can no longer exist, so it now asserts the
thing that distinguishes a blip from a 404, namely that the next question gets
a real verdict.

37 tests in the quota suite. Negative control: putting the write back fails 2.
All 16 node suites: 223 passed, gulp lint clean.

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Re-reviewed at 8091320. Both nits from my second approval are in, and the earlier items all hold: schedulePeek() on mount, the doQuery ref, the stop-promise race in abortCurrent, allowed === false for refusals, the blocked_by wall branch, and the open-before-mount latch.

One should-fix in the new consent code before this merges:

anonQuota.js:258-263: OneTrustGroupsUpdated is not a consent-change signal. OneTrust's Web CMP events guide says the event "is triggered each time the script loads, such as when the website is accessed or refreshed, and whenever the user updates their consent preferences." The listener is unconditional and does forgetQuota() then peekQuota(). OneTrust arrives via GTM (async, two extra hops) while a restored-open drawer or hover-intent loads the AskAI bundle immediately, so on most pageviews where the bundle evaluates before OneTrust initialises, the reader pays one quota request per pageview, drawer open or not. That is the per-pageview request the first should-fix removed, now bypassing canRemember(), the restore guard, and the once-per-pageview rule. Fix: compare event.detail (the active group ids) with the stamp the cached verdict was written under and only forget/re-ask when they differ. Add a test that an unchanged-groups event makes zero requests; the current test at :642-658 encodes the re-ask and will need adjusting.

Related, smaller: consentStamp() (:89, :119, :132) is null until OneTrust populates OnetrustActiveGroups, and any mismatch drops the cache. Since bundle-vs-OneTrust order varies per pageview, null vs ",C0001,C0003," flaps and each flap re-peeks. Treat null on either side as unknown and only discard when both are strings and differ. Tests at :593-610 set the stamp before load on both pageviews, so the mixed case is untested.

Nits: the canRemember() probe (:140-146) still writes to sessionStorage before any verdict exists (your 14:03 comment described the d90e801 behaviour, which 3320830 removed); the noconsent wall copy does not tell a solo decliner that accepting cookies restores a personal budget; the pre-existing <a>/<div> blocks under the new wrappers are not re-indented, invisible until the lint glob covers .jsx.

Confirmed the contract with docs-site#231 at 476372f1: the UI reads exactly the fields the backend emits, absent storage_allowed defaults to allowed, resetLabel clamps negatives, and every error path fails open. Declined consent is metered on the shared noconsent budget, not blocked and not unmetered, with nothing cached client-side. Note the gate is inert until #231 merges and DOCS_ANON_ASK_CONSENT_GROUP is set.

Antora roots each component's navigation in an item that has items but no
content, so nav-tree.hbs renders no row and no .nav-item-toggle for it.
Deferring that item's children into a <template> put every bucket's whole
tree behind a toggle that does not exist: the open bucket on the home page
showed an empty <ul> with one blank <li>, and expanding any other bucket
hydrated it to the same thing. The sidebar came up with no items at all.

A <template> is only worth shipping where the reader has something to click
to bring it back, so the deferral now requires ./content as well. The rows
below still defer their own subtrees, so the DOM saving that motivated this
is unchanged for every level that has a visible toggle.

The nav-tree test harness was registering only the helpers the partial used
before, so it needed `and` and `not` to compile the new condition.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@JakeSCahill
JakeSCahill merged commit 2cd3c28 into main Sep 18, 2026
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@JakeSCahill
JakeSCahill deleted the feat/anon-ask-quota branch September 18, 2026 08:51
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3 participants