The preview showed a badge nobody had

Somewhere in the plugin’s dashboard there is a picture of your badge. You pick a shape, a colour, maybe your own logo, and the picture keeps up as you go. Underneath it sits a line we wrote ourselves: preview is live, your site is not. It means nothing here reaches visitors until you press save.

It also implies something we had not checked in a while. That the preview is showing you your badge.

It was not. If you had set a logo, the preview left it out. If you wanted a plain badge, the preview added a small dot before the words whether your settings asked for one or not. The thing you were designing against and the thing your visitors were looking at had quietly stopped being the same thing.

Four, because a badge gets drawn more than once in there. The large preview at the top of Badge Studio. The twelve small shape thumbnails you choose from. The row of samples showing each kind of image. And the one laid over the picture in the Media viewer, which is the one somebody actually noticed, because it sat next to a photograph and looked wrong.

Why nothing caught it

The badge on your site is drawn by one piece of code. The badge in the dashboard is drawn by another, in a different language, for a different purpose. That is normal and mostly fine. It stops being fine the moment the rule changes on one side.

We had just added a rule: when a logo is set, drop the small dot, because a logo is already a mark and two of them side by side stop reading as a label and start reading as clutter. We changed the code that runs on your site. We tested it there. It worked there.

The previews were a second copy of the same rule and nobody had told them. Nothing failed, because a preview cannot fail. There is no test that says and this matches the site. It draws something confidently and you believe it, which is the whole trouble with drawing things confidently.

The awkward part

We did not find this. Somebody opened the Media tab, saw a dot sitting next to a logo, and said so. The fix took an hour. Not knowing had lasted four releases.

There is a version of this note that says we identified a subtle rendering inconsistency and resolved it. That version is more flattering and less true. What happened is that we built a mirror that showed the wrong face, then spent months looking into it approvingly.

The repair is small. Every place that draws a badge now takes the same two answers, is there a logo and is the dot switched on, and draws from those. Written once and passed around, instead of written four times and hoped over.

What we took from it

A setting is not finished when the front end obeys it. Every preview of that setting is a second implementation of the same rule, and a preview is exactly where a stale copy hides, because looking right is the entire job.

So the previews are part of the change now, not something remembered afterwards. And the small dot, since we were in there anyway, is yours to switch off completely from 2.1.6 — the styling guide has the details, alongside a fair amount else we got wrong and fixed in the same week.

We wrote once about why we write everything down, and this is that argument earning its keep. A mistake nobody records is one you get to make twice.