Scenario · 40 people
The 40
- ✓
The campaign is private
Tallow & Tide is private. Staff still reach it from the admin area without an invitation, or the team could not run it.Private means invisible, not visible-but-locked. The existence of the campaign is the thing being protected — which is why it is absent from the public listing rather than shown with a padlock.
- ✓
The issuer's list becomes invitations
7 people hold an invitation to Tallow & Tide. Paste more and every row comes back with an outcome — created, duplicate, already invited, or unreadable.Malformed entries are reported, never silently dropped. A silently discarded address is a person who never hears about the raise and whom nobody can find afterwards.
- ✓
Outreach goes out
5 of 7 have had outreach sent. 6 people are still waiting — that list is ordered longest-wait first, and anyone never sent to sorts above everyone because they are waiting on us.The invitation is the grant; the link is only delivery. Resending reissues delivery and never creates a second invitation.
- 4
Correct a wrong address without starting over
One address in this list has gone stale. On the waiting list, type the correct one over it and press the same button — correcting and resending is one action, not two.The previous address is retained rather than overwritten. An access record that quietly loses its history is not a record.
- 5
The invited person opens the email
0 messages are waiting in the fake inbox.No mail server is configured and no address is contacted. The inbox is the prototype's stand-in, and it is a god's-eye view — it can see every message, which no real recipient could.
- ✓
They follow the link and are simply in
1 person has followed their link. You are not signed in.No password at any point. If no account exists for the address one is created silently; if an account already exists the link resolves to it, and a second account is never created. That is the most likely correctness bug in this build, so it is the one worth watching.
- 7
They register interest, exactly as they always would
0 people have registered interest.This is a story rather than an oversight. The most likely way this build breaks something is by quietly changing the one part nobody was asked to touch, so the same component and the same action serve the private campaign and a public one.
- 8
Nobody uninvited can tell it exists
Open /c/tallow-and-tide and compare it with a slug that never existed. Signed out, both send you to sign-in, byte-identical. Signed in without an invitation, both return the same plain 404. Never a friendlier answer for the real one than for the fake one.The failure mode is not a visible error page. It is any observable difference between 'private campaign you may not see' and 'no such campaign' — status, body, headers, redirects or timing. What you get depends only on whether you are signed in, never on which slug you tried, so it reveals nothing about which campaigns are real.