Editorial transparency record
This page is a deliberately concise public log of major changes to this website's contents — primarily privacy redactions, factual corrections to published material, and material content replacements that visitors should know about. Minor typo fixes, formatting tweaks, and routine updates are intentionally omitted to keep this page useful.
For the full, byte-level change history, the deployed static HTML of each language is stored in a public GitHub repository:
- English (this site): https://github.com/ecthrwatch/www.ecthrwatch.org
- French: https://github.com/ecthrwatch/fr.ecthrwatch.org
- Chinese: https://github.com/ecthrwatch/zh.ecthrwatch.org
Anyone can clone those repositories and use git log to inspect every
commit. Where the public record has been deliberately edited (e.g., to
remove a private email address that was inadvertently leaked into a
URL), that fact is documented here as well — so the omission itself
remains transparent.
2026-05-18 — Removal of a private email address from URL history
What happened. A backend-data migration introduced URL slugs on the
/people/ and /parties/ index pages that embedded the local-part
(i.e., the part before the @) of one of the website operator's
personal email addresses. The affected slugs were live on the website
for a short period. As soon as the issue was noticed, those slugs were
renamed so the local-part no longer appeared in any URL, and the
underlying party data was consolidated so the email-derived slug form
was no longer used at all.
What was changed in the public record. The git history of the
English and French public deploy repositories
(ecthrwatch/www.ecthrwatch.org and ecthrwatch/fr.ecthrwatch.org)
was rewritten to remove every occurrence of the affected string from
every commit's file paths, file contents, and commit messages. The
rewritten history was then force-pushed to GitHub. The website itself
was unaffected — only the historical record in the deploy repositories
was scrubbed.
Why. A private email's local-part does not belong in the public record of a website that the operator did not knowingly publish that information on. The redaction is narrow: only the local-part of one address was removed; no other content, attribution, or factual material was modified.
Caveat. Old commit SHAs of the pre-scrub history may remain reachable via direct-SHA URLs on GitHub for up to 90 days after the force-push, until GitHub's internal garbage collection removes them. The Internet Archive (archive.org) may also have captured affected URLs during the affected window; separate takedown procedures apply there.
Notes
If you have observed something on this site that you believe ought to be on this errata page and is not, please get in touch via the Contact page.
This page is published in English first; equivalent versions in French, Italian, and Chinese (纠正, jiūzhèng) follow as those locales are updated.