The Bing hero tier currently returns no banner for artists it used to cover.
Every gate in the candidate loop is a silent `continue`, so a tier that throws
away all 525 parsed results looks identical to Bing returning nothing at all —
which is why this has now read as a fresh regression four times without anything
being able to confirm or deny it.
Emit HERO_GATES alongside HERO_WAVE: what was parsed, what was accepted, and the
count discarded by each gate, plus the first few identity rejections in full.
That immediately separates "our filter broke" from "Bing sent us junk".
It says the second one. For Camping in Alaska: parsed=525, accepted=0,
identity=510 — and the rejected cards are campground photos from recreation.gov
and thedyrt.com. Partiboi69 returns Bruce Lee wallpapers, Fishmans returns Tommy
Fury boxing coverage, Hermeth returns aesthetic quote wallpapers. The results are
unrelated to the query and to each other, so the identity gate is doing exactly
its job: refusing to hang another person's face on the artist.
Confirmed outside the app, straight from curl. Zero query-relevant result cards
on any variant — with and without qft/form/first/cc/setlang/tsc, with full
browser client-hint and sec-fetch headers, and against the /images/async grid
endpoint the page itself uses. The async endpoint answers "Fishmans band photo"
with AI-course ads and "Partiboi69 band photo" with celebrity photoshoots. Our
url is well formed and the parser is fine: `q` is properly encoded, and cards
still parse (252-525 of them). Bing is simply no longer honouring the query for
this client.
Also stop one bad answer from sticking. Bing serves the SAME url a card-less
page on one read and 25-80 cards on the next, and browser_html caches whatever
came back for CATALOG_TTL — so a single degraded response left an artist
heroless for fifteen minutes. A wave that parses to nothing now drops the cached
page and asks once more. This does not address the wrong-results failure above;
it removes a compounding one found while chasing it.
No hero behaviour is changed by this commit.
KeelrLeek
3718dad667