Two silent failures sitting between Phase A and a working invitation.
The compose file never passed MAIL_* through. Compose does not give a
container the contents of .env — it only substitutes into the compose
file — so the settings could be filled in correctly and read by nobody,
with the app reporting mail as unconfigured and the values sitting right
there on disk. test_deployment.py now fails the build whenever
.env.example and docker-compose.yml drift apart, which is how this
happened and how it would happen again.
The app's code is baked into the image (COPY apps /srv/apps), so a pull
followed by --force-recreate runs the old code and says nothing. Added
scripts/deploy-board.sh: rebuild, sync the compose file, restart, print
the log, and name any setting present in .env.example and missing from
the live .env. It never touches .env itself.
Also: "no mail server configured" is now told apart from "the mail
server refused". They want different things done about them, and the
first one sent an admin looking for an SMTP error that never existed.
The new-member form says so before it is filled in rather than after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Until now an admin created an account, the password appeared once on screen,
and that was the only copy. Gitea's Forgot password answers "Account recovery
is disabled because no email is set up", because this server has never been
able to send mail. Every route a member had to a password of their own was
closed, which made the members area unusable by anyone not standing next to the
owner.
Now: the admin enters a username and an email, the server creates the Gitea
account with a random password nobody ever sees — the admin included — and the
member is emailed a link to a Viena Latina page where they choose their own.
The same mechanism gives "¿Olvidaste tu contraseña?" that works, replacing
Gitea's dead page. Nobody leaves the site for either, which is possible because
PATCH /admin/users/{username} accepts a password.
A link is enough to take an account, so it is treated as a credential: single
use, short-lived, stored only as a SHA-256, and invalidated when a newer one is
issued so an older email stops working. SHA-256 rather than a password hash
because these are 32 random bytes, not something a person chose — there is no
dictionary to slow down. Recovery answers identically for a known and an
unknown address, or the form becomes a way to enumerate members one address at
a time, and stops after three tries so it cannot be used to mail-bomb somebody
using this server's reputation.
Rejecting a password deliberately does not spend the token. A typo must not
lock somebody out of an account they have never reached.
If the mail fails the admin is shown the link instead. The account exists
either way, so the difference is between a delayed invitation and a person who
simply never gets in.
Found while testing: the rate limit did not work at all. created_at is written
by SQLite as "2026-09-25 15:00:00" and I compared it against Python's
"2026-09-25T15:00:00+00:00"; a space sorts before T, so every row looked older
than any threshold and the limit silently never fired. It is now compared
inside SQLite, where the format and the clock are the same one.
Also drops two tabs from the sign-in page: OpenID, which nobody here will use,
and Register, which contradicted DISABLE_REGISTRATION and invited people to try
something the server then refused.
Verified: 126 checks. Tokens are hashed at rest, work once, expire, die when
reissued, and are refused for a suspended member; a short password and a Gitea
rejection both leave the link usable; recovery is indistinguishable for known
and unknown addresses and stops at three; creating a member emails them and
shows no password; a failed send surfaces the link.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Running without GITEA_ADMIN_TOKEN is the safer configuration and is documented
as such, but the member form did not know: it offered "Crear también su cuenta"
ticked by default and reported "Falta GITEA_ADMIN_TOKEN" only on submit, after
three fields had been filled in.
That is the shape of failure this project has lost the most time to — something
that cannot happen, going unsaid until someone has relied on it. The form now
reads the config when it renders and says so, with a link to Gitea's create-user
page.
The checkbox is disabled rather than hidden, because "you cannot do this here"
is more use than an option that quietly is not there. The refusal itself stays
in the handler: a disabled input is a courtesy, and a hand-crafted POST still
meets the same error.
Verified: 104 checks. The form states the limit with no token and is unchanged
with one, and submitting create_account anyway still creates no member.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Two halves of the same complaint: the journey into the members area does not
feel like one platform.
Members sign in to /comunidad/ through Gitea, so Gitea's sign-in form and
authorize dialog are part of everyone's journey, not just of anyone who opens a
repository. That is what the earlier "is Gitea only for admins?" question got
wrong. Unthemed they are two dark screens in the middle of a cream site.
Unlike Decap, Gitea supports being themed, so this needs no forking and nothing
a release can silently undo. The repository holds only the colour overrides;
scripts/gitea-theme.sh concatenates them onto the light theme it reads out of
the running container. Keeping somebody else's stylesheet in here would go
stale and turn every Gitea upgrade into a merge — the script is re-run instead,
which is one line in the upgrade notes. Getting a variable name wrong leaves a
corner grey rather than breaking a page, which is the failure mode worth having
when the names belong to someone else's project.
The logo is the site's wordmark, as live text in the same font stack rather than
traced to paths: the site loads no webfont at all, deliberately, so visitors
already see it in whatever sans-serif their machine substitutes. Paths would
render a Montserrat most people never see on the site itself.
Salir was the sharper problem. It cleared this session and the stored token, and
then said "Sesión cerrada" — while the Gitea session in the same browser stayed
open and Gitea still remembered the authorisation, so one click signed the next
person straight back in with no password. On a laptop shared around an
association, that button was lying.
It cannot be fixed from here. Gitea's logout has been POST-only since 1.11.2, so
a link cannot trigger it and a cross-site POST needs a CSRF token this app does
not have; prompt=login is undocumented in every released version of Gitea's
OAuth2 provider, and a security control should not rest on that. So the logout
page now says exactly what is closed and what is not, and links to the one place
that finishes it. Being honest about a limit beats a reassuring message that is
false.
Verified: 101 checks, two of them new — logout warns rather than redirecting,
and leaves no token the server could still act with. The theme itself is
visual and has to be looked at; docs/server-setup.md §12 says where.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Decap looks like a different product because it cannot be made to look like
this one: its maintainer's answer is override the CSS and accept that class
names move between releases, or fork it and carry that forever. Neither is
worth building on, so editing moves into the app that already has the site's
design and this project's tests.
Posts are files in git, so the editor is a form that commits a file through
Gitea's contents API. No working copy, no queue, no new state, and no way for
the pipeline to tell which editor wrote the file — which is what makes running
both at once safe. Decap keeps working; nothing here removes it, and the
fallback if something is missing is switching tabs.
Filenames and frontmatter are not this module's to invent. They are the
contract scripts/translate.py reads: `<basename>.es.md` is what split_lang()
parses, the date prefix is what keeps two posts with one title off a single
URL, and the absence of `translated_from` is what marks a file as something a
person wrote. Several tests import translate.py and run its own parser over
what the editor produced, because a file it cannot parse publishes in Spanish
and is never translated, with nothing reported anywhere.
Commits carry the writer's own Gitea account rather than a bot's, so history
says who wrote each post and Gitea's permissions apply unchanged. That needs
their access token, which lives in the database and never in a cookie: Flask
signs cookies but does not encrypt them, and a token is enough to commit as its
owner. Gitea expires tokens after about an hour, so they refresh ahead of
expiry and retry once on rejection — without that, saving would start failing
partway through an afternoon for no reason the writer could see.
Publishing is admin-only. Posting to the internal board and publishing to the
public site are different permissions, and the second is the larger grant.
Listing caches frontmatter against the git blob sha, because the contents API
returns names without bodies: that turns one request per post on every page
load into one request in total, and needs no invalidation, since a sha changes
only when the file does.
Verified: 97 checks. The filename translate.py parses, an authored source that
is_generated() rejects, the freeze toggle round-tripping, a stale sha refused
with the other edit intact, six filename shapes that must 404 including a
generated sibling, plain members refused, an SVG rejected as an image, uploads
not colliding, the cache reading each file once and refreshing when it changes,
and a preview that renders markdown, escapes script tags and publishes nothing.
Smoke-tested live: routes register and gate correctly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Everything on this site so far has been a file built from git. This is the
first component that runs code to answer a request and the first whose data
git does not hold, so the trade is stated in the README and the backup script
is not optional.
Roles are owner, admin and user. The owner is seeded once from BOARD_OWNER and
cannot be seeded again, because otherwise editing a compose file would be a
quieter way to take the top role than asking for it; ownership moves only by
transfer, inside the app. There is exactly one owner and a partial unique index
enforces it, so the invariant holds even when a handler is wrong. The owner is
beyond suspension and demotion by everyone, themselves included. Only the owner
makes admins; admins make users.
Sign-in goes through Gitea as a confidential OAuth client — the opposite of
Decap, which has to be public because it runs in the browser. The rule the
whole thing rests on is that a Gitea account is not a membership: entry needs
an active row in `members`, or every account on the instance is a member,
starting with the translations bot.
Admins can delete any post; nobody can edit anyone else's, admins included.
Taking a post down is visible to its author. Quietly rewriting it is not, and
an admin who could do that could leave a sentence attributed to someone who
never wrote it. The plan said admins could do both; this is the one place the
implementation departs from it.
Markdown renders with raw HTML disabled, which is the entire XSS defence and
the reason there is no sanitiser: the renderer emits only its own tags and
escapes the rest. The CSP carries no 'unsafe-inline', which makes an inline
onsubmit silently inert rather than broken, so the confirmation dialogs live in
a static file and a test fails any template that grows an inline handler.
GDPR is in scope rather than deferred: erasure removes the member row and moves
their authorship to a tombstone so the conversations around them still read,
and any member can download their own writing.
Verified: 63 checks pass, covering the membership gate, every role predicate, a
direct insert of a second owner being refused by the index, atomic ownership
transfer, CSRF, an offsite login redirect, script tags rendering as text, soft
deletes leaving both listings and exports, and the member screens rendering for
each role. Smoke-tested live: headers, both static assets, and the bare
/comunidad redirect that the Caddy matcher has to cover.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
Gitea ticks "Confidential Client" by default, which makes it demand a client
secret. Decap runs in the browser and authenticates with PKCE, so there is
nowhere to keep one — the login then fails after the authorize screen, which
reads like a Decap bug rather than a registration mistake.
Also spells out step 9 as commands, notes that the Client ID is published in
the site's JavaScript by design (so committing it is fine, but the placeholder
is what belongs in a resold copy), and records the two failure modes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
The DeepL free tier is metered (it failed in production with HTTP 456
Quota exceeded) and would require every deployment of this platform to
carry its own API account. Translation now runs on M2M100 418M (MIT) via
CTranslate2, shipped inside the pipeline image: no key, no quota, and no
content or visitor data leaving the server.
Also restores the multi-source behaviour of the original WordPress plugin,
which the Python port had narrowed to Spanish-only. Any of the three site
languages can now be the authored original.
Because any language can be a source, loop prevention is no longer
structural and is now explicit: generated siblings carry `translated_from`
and are never treated as sources, and the bot's own [skip-translate]
commits are skipped outright (that marker was already being written but
never read).
Markup protection moves in-process now that DeepL's tag_handling=html is
gone. Code blocks and raw HTML pass through untouched; link targets,
inline code and protected community terms are masked with placeholders
that are verified to survive the round trip, failing the pipeline rather
than shipping corrupted text.
Two fixes along the way:
- Generated siblings no longer inherit the source's `slug`. They did,
which meant the first retranslation of a WordPress-migrated post moved
/de/<german-slug>/ onto /de/<spanish-slug>/ and destroyed the inbound
link preservation wp-to-hugo.py exists for.
- `manual_translation` now works from the CMS. Decap only ever exposed it
on the source while the script read it on the target, so the toggle did
nothing. It now means "hands off" on both sides.
wp-to-hugo.py marks migrated Polylang siblings frozen, since those are
human translations and regenerating them would replace them with weaker
machine output.
Adds --backfill for sources missing siblings, which also fixes the
existing 404s on /de/page/acerca/ and /pt-br/page/contacto/.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NizVpJ2dwzCbjCrTLCjeHn
- infra/caddy/Caddyfile: git.* and ci.* proxies live now; main-site block
(with WP 301 redirects) commented until cutover day
- infra/gitea and infra/woodpecker: Docker Compose bound to localhost
behind Caddy, with .env.example for the Woodpecker OAuth credentials
- docs/server-setup.md: every command from ordering the CX22 through the
end-to-end translation test, plus the cutover-day checklist
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017z2rT1oN7vMS4ggo23n5WG
