1.45.0

New features

• The compatibility questions are rebuilt from scratch. The inherited OKCupid corpus is gone,
  replaced by a curated set of about 300 written for this — and they now arrive in a deliberate
  order: films and sleep schedules first, addiction history and anger last, so nobody is asked for an
  admission before they have any reason to give one
• Every question is filed under a domain — kids & family, money, work, politics, religion, sex &
  intimacy, health, and the rest — and you can filter a profile's answers by one. "What does this
  person think about money" over a hundred answers is now one tap rather than a scroll
• You read someone's answer once you've answered the question yourself. Until then the row shows
  the question and a way to answer it
• A redesigned answer screen: your own answer and what you'd accept sit side by side in two
  aligned columns, and importance is a scale that fills as you hover, so you can see what a click
  means before making it
• Finishing the core questions now says so, and offers to keep going, instead of quietly closing
• A referral leaderboard at /leaderboard: who has
  personally brought the most people to Compass, with your own row always on the page — highlighted
  where you rank, or pinned to the bottom if you're further down

Improvements

• Rarer interests, causes and jobs no longer vanish from a profile. Anything outside the most-used
  slice — including an option someone had just created — was being dropped from the page entirely
• Emails now show a member's initial where they have no photo, instead of a blank silhouette sitting
  next to the members who do
• You can start ten new conversations a day before the anti-spam limit trips, up from five — it was
  catching people who were simply busy
• The FAQ covers the iPhone app rather than the PWA workaround it replaced, and the platforms answer
  now names both stores and the minimum OS versions
• "Pause AI / Tech Skeptic" is just "Pause AI" — the two aren't the same position
• Clearer contrast on profile notes

Trust & safety

• An account on hold can still browse. A provisional hold is not a verdict — nobody has looked at
  it yet, and most turn out to be genuine — so it now takes away only what can hurt other people.
  Every attempt to write says plainly that it's automatic, that a person will review it within a day,
  and that nothing already written has been lost
• Signups arriving through a commercial VPN network are held for that review. In the September 2026
  audit those networks carried 12 of the 13 confirmed-abuse accounts; it is a signal, never proof, so
  it buys a hold and a moderator's attention rather than a ban. Apple's Hide My Email is exempt —
  that's privacy plumbing, the opposite of a fraud signal

Database

• New migrations: 20260909_categorize_compatibility_prompts.sql,
  20260910_recategorize_compatibility_prompts.sql
• compatibility_prompts.category is populated for the whole live corpus against
  common/src/profiles/compatibility-categories.ts. The column existed but was effectively unused — 187 of
  220 prompts null, the other 33 carrying a mix of answer shapes and domains, sometimes several
  semicolon-joined in one field. The second migration supersedes the first for the 130 prompts in the
  2026-09-10 export: the taxonomy was reshaped between them (politics_religion, money_work,
  health_rhythm, conflict_communication, growth_emotions and care_obligation split or merged),
  and applying the first alone would write 101 rows matching nothing the filter offers
• importance_score becomes the serving order, not a weight: get-compatibility-questions orders
  by it DESC, so the core 67 run 67 down to 1 and everything else sits at 0 after the ramp. A low
  number means "ask this later", never "this counts less"

Backend & API

• New endpoints: get-referral-leaderboard, get-compatibility-question-degeneracy,
  delete-compatibility-prompt, recompute-all-compatibility-scores
• get-referral-leaderboard is public but cache: 'private' — the response varies by caller (the
  you row, and whether avatars are redacted), so a shared cache would serve someone else's place on
  the board. The handler, not the page, applies redactMemberOnlyUser
• VPN check at signup: shared/moderation/vpn-check.ts resolves an IP against prefixes announced by
  known VPN/hosting ASNs, fetched from RIPEstat at boot and refreshed daily (startVpnRangeRefresh in
  serve.ts, cached in tmpdir so a dev restart doesn't re-ask). Run after the user row exists, not
  inline in the signup, because a cold instance can take ten seconds to load the tables; a hit sets
  isBannedFromPosting with banReason: 'under_review' and posts to Discord #reports
• canBrowseWhileBanned / isFullyBanned / bannedFromWritingError in common/moderation/ban.ts,
  with assertCanWrite in helpers/endpoint.ts — the three write paths that tested
  isBannedFromPosting themselves all threw a bare "You are banned"
• MAX_NEW_CHANNELS_PER_DAY 5 → 10
• get-user-and-profile returns option names alongside ids, index for index, as get-profiles
  already did; queries ORDER BY id so the two arrays stay aligned
• avatarSrc in backend/email/emails/utils.tsx, replacing /images/default-avatar.png;
  DEPLOYED_WEB_URL dropped as unused
• API version 1.78.0 → 1.79.0

Web

• New pages: leaderboard, admin/compatibility-questions
• The admin dashboard shows the two independent ways a prompt stops discriminating — the share on the
  most-picked self-answer and on the most-picked accepted set — greyed below 20 answers, flagged at
  70% and 85%, with delete + recompute wired to the new endpoints
• web/components/compatibility/category.tsx (CompatibilityCategoryFilter,
  CompatibilityCategoryTag, matchesCategory) and community-importance.tsx, which replaces the
  spelled-out "Community Importance: 35%" that wrapped to two lines on a phone
• isPromptHiddenUntilYouAnswer is front-end only — the answer is already in the payload, so this is
  a nudge, not a privacy boundary. A hidden prompt is searched by its question alone, so a covered
  answer isn't findable by its own text
• The answer dialog sizes to content on desktop instead of inheriting MODAL_CLASS's fixed height,
  and the core run is ordered (sort control hidden) while everything after it is shuffled
• ProfileGrid shows a compact hold notice above the grid for a member who can still browse
• fr/de translations for all of the above

Tooling, scripts & docs

• scripts/bump-version.sh rewritten: yarn bump moves the three versions only, yarn bump:build
  (new) moves the two store counters independently, both read every number back after writing and
  refuse a version that isn't higher than what's on disk
• scripts/release.sh and docs/releases.md reworked around the split between "open the next
  version" and "release it"; cd.yml now triggers on CHANGELOG.md, since the entry — not the
  version bump — is what says ship
• docs/compatibility-questions.md: how to write a prompt that screens, the coverage table the
  category keys derive from, and what to retire
• backend/scripts/2026-09-10-import-selected-compatibility-prompts.ts (validation + dry run) and
  2026-09-10-vpn-asn-dry-run.ts (read-only: what the VPN rule would have done to existing members)
• E2E seed sets importance_score descending so onboarding takes the real core-questions path
  instead of the "no core questions" fallback

Full Changelog: 1.44.0...1.45.0