# The 69% link-board rot was two defects wearing one number

_2026-09-22 · booth_

**Re-measuring the board before writing U6's contract split its headline number
in half, and the half U6 owns is the smaller one.** The IA doc records *211
rows, 145 (69%) pointing at booths that no longer exist*. Re-counted on
2026-09-22 the board was 221 rows — and the split nobody had taken before:

| | count | share |
|---|---|---|
| rows that are booth URLs | **178** | 80% of the board |
| …whose booth is already swept | **156** | **71% of the whole board** |
| rows that are NOT booth URLs | 43 | 19% |
| …distinct after full-URL normalization | 35 | |
| …collapsed by the re-post problem U6 names | **8 rows** | |

So the 69% is:

1. **Booth-announcement rot — 178 rows.** A session posted a booth URL because
   a booth could not announce itself. **U5 already closed the cause.** Nothing
   stopped the habit, so the board took 11 more of these in the day after it was
   first measured.
2. **Bench re-post — 8 rows.** An append log with no identity. This is the part
   the registry fixes, and it is an order of magnitude smaller.

**The third thing, which the IA doc does not describe at all:** of the 35
distinct non-booth targets, roughly **14 are running services (benches)** and
roughly **14 are reference bookmarks** — gitea repos, HuggingFace model cards, a
vLLM recipe, a Headscale page — with the rest ephemeral one-shot links. The IA
doc planned for `booth link` to survive "as a deprecated alias". That would have
evicted a third of the board's live content from the only home it has. **U6 does
not deprecate `booth link`**; it removes exactly one shape from it.

**Why this is worth keeping.** The single 69% figure implies the registry is the
big win. It is not — the enforced rule and the dead marker are. A unit scoped
off the unsplit number would have built the registry, declared victory, and left
178 rows rotting. Re-measure before contracting; the number in the design doc is
a day old the moment it is written.