0.11.38 — a series withdrawn

An author is sometimes in a position where a published text has to stop being visible. Not because it is bad, and not in order to destroy it — it simply must not stand on display right now. Until this release the engine had two answers. 'nav' takes a series out of the menu while its entries keep flowing in the stream and the feed. 'all' takes it out of everywhere, leaving its own address standing — because the rule was that hiding is not deletion, and a link sent a year ago should still reach the text.

The rule is a good one and it stays. What it does not cover is the case where being unreachable is precisely the intention: the series is to disappear from the reader's view, not merely come off the billboard. Hence a third degree, `hidden: "gone"`. The series index answers 404, every one of its entries answers 404, the stable key `/i/<key>` no longer leads there, and the series drops out of the feed, the sitemap, the offline bundle and notifications. It is the only variant that breaks the 'hiding, not deletion' rule, which is why it has its own name rather than being a quiet extension of the previous one.

The cut sits in one place — the function that returns a series' published entries. It was tempting to add the condition in the index route and the entry route, but routes accumulate, and a missed path here is not a cosmetic defect: it is a text on display that was meant to be down. Since everything that reads entries by the series address passes through that one function anyway, the condition belongs to it.

What matters most is what the change does not do. It does not touch the content. The entry files sit in the repository untouched, with their dates, keys and images; comments, ratings and stars stay in the database, because the database is shared across language versions and knows nothing about billboards. Bringing the series back is the deletion of one field from the series file — not restoring texts from a backup and not guessing what used to be there.

One thing lies outside the reach of this flag and should be said plainly. An instance's content is built into the application at build time, so the texts of a withdrawn series still travel in the bundle the browser downloads — no address leads to them, but anyone who can read a bundle will find them there. The flag takes a series off the site, not out of the files. Anyone who needs them gone from the files has to move the directory outside the instance's content — reversible too, by moving it back rather than by a field.