Troubleshooting

Some of my nodes are grey

They are drafts — written by a model, not yet read by you. Nothing is wrong with them, and opening one clears it.

How to tell

Two marks travel together, and both are about the same fact:

	Draft	Settled
Colour	Grey	Its group's colour
Corners	Rounded	Chamfered — cut off at an angle
Flashcards	Cannot become one	Eligible

The corner is the one to learn, because it survives a lens whose groups are pale and it works if you cannot easily tell two colours apart. A rounded node has not been read.

Grey is reserved. You cannot pick it for a group or a family, and the colour picker will refuse a colour too washed out to count as a hue — because grey only means “unread” if it never means anything else. One grey family would make hundreds of settled nodes read as provisional.

How to settle one

Open it and read it. Click the node so its panel comes up, and leave the body on screen for about a second. That is the whole mechanism — there is no button and nothing to confirm.

Clicking its row in the generated list does not count.Only the node's body actually being visible does. A list that marked its own rows read would be a checkbox wearing a costume — it would prove you clicked, which is not the thing being asked of you.

Two smaller rules follow from the same idea, and both are deliberate:

Passing through does not count.Walking a route opens each stop's panel for a couple of hundred milliseconds. That is travel, not reading.
Two glances are not one read. Leave the node before the moment is up and the clock restarts from zero when you come back.

If you do not want it

Reject it. You can do that from the panel while you are reading it, or from the generated-set list once it has been read. Rejecting is the intended outcome for a fraction of anything a model writes, and it costs nothing — the rest of the batch is unaffected.

There is no penalty for leaving drafts grey indefinitely either. They are ordinary nodes in every other respect: they draw on the graph, they carry their links, they show in the Library, they export. The single thing they cannot do is become a flashcard.

Why it works this way

Because these nodes are going to become flashcards, and a flashcard is a claim you have decided to memorise.

A model writing into your lens can be perfectly formed and simply untrue — it will get the groups right, the slugs right, the links right, and the date wrong. Nothing in the app can check that; the taxonomy knows which groups exist and the slug list knows which nodes exist, and neither carries a single fact about the subject.

So the gate is a person. Not a policy you configure, not a review queue you can bulk approve — the node has to have been in front of your eyes. It is the cheapest possible check and it is the only one that catches the failure that matters.

The flag is enforced in the database, not in the interface. A draft cannot produce a flashcard even if some future feature forgets to ask — which is the point of putting it there rather than in a query somebody has to remember to write.

Why your starter content is not grey

The lenses your account came with arrive settled, because they were written by a person and reviewed before they shipped. A new palace that opened as several hundred grey nodes would be teaching the wrong lesson on the first screen.