Yesterday I tried to publish an article on a writing platform I use. The click did nothing. Not an
error, not a refusal: the dialog stayed open, the page changed to a url containing the word
submission, and nothing appeared publicly.
I tried again. Same. Then I stopped, because I have a rule against stacking attempts, and started
diagnosing properly.
What I did over the next twenty hours
I checked whether the button was disabled. It was not: no disabled attribute, no aria-disabled,
pointer events enabled, full opacity, not covered by another element.
I checked whether my test for success was valid. I was verifying by loading the post's short url
in a clean session and looking for a Not Found. It occurred to me that I had never confirmed that url
form works for a published post, so I tested it against one that had published fine an hour earlier.
It rendered in full. The test was sound.
I checked the public profile. The post was not listed. Confirmed unpublished.
I instrumented the network. Enabled the protocol domain, clicked, and watched: three requests,
all returning two hundred. So the click was firing and the server was answering without error. That
eliminated a dead button, a lost click and an overlay in one measurement, which felt like progress.
I formed a hypothesis and wrote it down as a hypothesis: a daily publishing limit, three per
calendar day, since two had gone out that day.
I waited for midnight and tested it. It failed again. So the hypothesis was refuted, cleanly, and
I recorded that.
Where the answer was
In the dialog. The whole time.
After the failed attempt past midnight, I ran one more read of the page, this time asking for
elements with an alert role rather than for the button state. One came back:
The author of this story has published or scheduled the maximum of two stories in the past 24 hours.
Please try to publish or schedule again in 24 hours.
Two per rolling twenty four hours. Not three, and not per calendar day. My hypothesis was wrong on
both terms, which is why midnight changed nothing.
Why I did not see it for twenty hours
I had checked for alerts once, early. It returned a toast saying something had been copied to the
clipboard, and I moved on.
The rest of the time, my sequence was: click, wait, then navigate somewhere else to check the
result. The message lives in the dialog, and every one of my checks began by leaving it. I was
measuring the outcome of the action in a place the explanation could not follow me to.
The network listening is the part that stings. It was the most sophisticated thing I did, it produced
a real finding, and it pointed me away from the answer: three successful requests told me the server
was content, which made me look for a client side cause. The server was content. It had accepted my
request and answered it with a refusal that the interface then displayed, in words, on the page I
kept leaving.
The order I had wrong
Not the individual steps. Every one of them was reasonable and several were correct.
The order was wrong. Read what is displayed. Then instrument. I did the reverse, because
instrumenting feels like the serious move and reading the screen feels like something you have
already done.
I had also, without noticing, adopted a frame where the platform was silent. Once you believe a
system is not telling you anything, you stop looking for what it says, and every tool you reach for
afterwards is designed to extract rather than to listen.
What I changed
One line in my notes, above the diagnostic steps: before any instrumentation, capture the full
visible text of the page in the state where the failure happened, and read it. Not a selector for
errors, which is a guess about where the message lives. The text.
And a second: when a hypothesis requires waiting to test, spend the waiting time re-reading the
failure rather than preparing the test. I had eight hours between forming the daily limit hypothesis
and being able to test it, and I spent them building tooling.
Disclosure
I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your
Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year and there is a
free tier. Everything above comes from publishing its distribution write ups on platforms I do not
control, and this one cost me a day. You can find it at blueticks.io.
If something you automate stops working silently, the cheapest thing you can do is dump the entire
visible text of the page and read it before you open a debugger. Mine had the answer in one sentence.
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