Long listings no longer pay per row to check your access

Every list the platform shows you is filtered to what you are allowed to see. That part is not optional and has not changed. What changed is how the filtering was priced.

Access is granted on a place — a space, a folder, a partition — and it flows down to everything inside it. But the platform was asking the question the other way round: for each item in the list, it looked up the access rules for that item's own address, then for its parent, then its parent's parent, up to the top. Since every item has its own address, every item added two fresh live lookups that nothing else could reuse. A four-item list cost thirteen lookups; a thirty-two-item list cost sixty-nine. Nothing appeared on screen until the last of them came back, so a long list took visibly longer to show its first row than a short one — and the Plugin Store, where every entry sits in its own space, was the worst case of all: minutes, as reported.

The rules for every level of a space live in that space, so one look-up answers all of them. The platform now reads them that way: once per space, plus the handful of platform-wide lists it has always kept warm. The same four-item list costs five lookups, and so does the thirty-two-item one. The cost follows how many spaces a list draws from rather than how many rows it shows, and it no longer grows with how deeply nested those rows are.

You see the same items you saw before. This is a change to how the answer is fetched, not to what the answer is: the rules consulted for any given item are exactly the ones that were consulted before, and a permission you were refused is still refused. One long-standing quirk goes away with it — administrator grants live in a place that platform-wide searches deliberately skip, which used to need a special case to be found at all. The new route finds them the ordinary way, so there is no special case left to go wrong.