A momentary glitch no longer looks like a locked door

Every page a logged-out visitor opens is checked against one question: is this page published to the public? Most of the time the answer is a clear yes or a clear no. Occasionally the check itself cannot complete — a moment of load, a component restarting in the background, a slow reply that never arrives.

Until now those three situations produced the same answer. "We could not work it out" was recorded as "no", so the visitor landed on the sign-in screen for a page that may well have been public, and would keep landing there for as long as the hiccup lasted. Nothing was written to the log, so from the outside a passing glitch was indistinguishable from a page that is genuinely private — the symptom reached us as support questions rather than as anything anyone could search for.

The check now has three answers rather than two:

• published — the page loads, exactly as before;
• not published — sign-in first, exactly as before;
• could not be determined — nothing is served, nothing is claimed about the visitor, and the answer is temporarily unavailable rather than a sign-in bounce. It is also written to the log, naming the page and the reason, so a recurring one is now something an operator can find.

Nothing becomes more visible: a page whose check does not complete still shows nobody anything. The change is only in what the visitor and the log are told — an honest "try again in a moment" instead of a confident, wrong "this is not for you".

Public pages, published catalogs and course covers are unaffected, and a page that really is private still asks for sign-in in exactly the way it did before.

The same mistake, in three more places. Reviewing the fix turned up other actions that gave the same confident wrong answer when their check hiccuped:

• Recycling a node replied "Recycle requires Update permission — ask someone with write access". Told to someone who already had write access, that sends them to interrupt a colleague over nothing. It now says the check did not complete and to try again.
• Exporting quietly left a node out of the ZIP. It is still left out — that is the safe direction — but the omission is now recorded, so an export that is short a node is something you can find out about rather than something you discover later.
• Setting up a new personal or shared space skipped a repair step without distinguishing "not needed" from "could not tell". The visible behaviour is unchanged; the difference is now in the record.