booth/persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-desk-sorts-by-last-update.md

The Desk's "Everything else" sorts by last UPDATE, not last activity

2026-09-23. Commit 64f6488. Operator: "how is this last activity first?", then "Easier — last activity can just be last time the booth was updated, not necessarily operator's last activity."

What was wrong

• The section sorted by _newest_mtime, which counts .viewed. Every GET of a booth, marks or review page records a look.
• Two sessions' post-deploy GET sweeps (17:48 and 21:46, both 127.0.0.1) recorded a look at 22 booths within half a second. The section collapsed into reverse name order through the (mtime, name) reverse tie-break.
• The rows show "updated X ago" (landed_at), a different clock from the sort.
• The same sweeps emptied "new since you looked". The access log showed 3 booths never opened from a 10.0.10.x or 100.64.x device: dfa-landing, ldp-polish, pewpew-ui-brief.
• The operator declined repairing .viewed from the log (the mesh IPs can't be attributed with certainty), and declined gating views on Sec-Fetch-Dest. Both were offered.

The fix

• rest.sort(key=(-landed_at, name)), labelled "last updated first".
• list_booths keeps its order for its other readers, and _newest_mtime still feeds lifetime.
• The r2_flow contract (§3, the ordering table, INV-5) and the ROADMAP ordering row were amended.
• CLAUDE.md "Working in here" now says how to check live without recording a look.