Unified News Syndication Security & Safety

This document outlines the safety mechanisms and architectural constraints designed to prevent accidental or malformed automated posts to social media (Twitter/X, GitHub, Open Collective) and RSS by the CI/CD pipeline and Vox Orchestrator agents.

Related: searchable incident patterns and external references — news_syndication_incident_patterns.md.

1. The Accidental Post Problem

Automated systems, especially agentic orchestration loops, can rapidly generate content. Without strict constraints, a misconfigured agent or a rogue loop could spam production feeds.

Common causes:

1. Unbounded retries — Failing to record completion, causing duplicate posts.
2. Live credentials in “test” paths — No dry-run or mock HTTP separation.
3. Weak typing — Invalid frontmatter slipping through.

2. Safety Mechanisms

A. dry_run (global and per-item)

The Publisher honors config.dry_run || item.syndication.dry_run. When true:

• No HTTP writes to X, GitHub, or Open Collective.
• RSS file is not mutated (only “would update” logs).
• MCP vox_news_test_syndicate forces dry-run and omits tokens.

B. Single source of truth (types + validation)

• GitHub: GitHubPostType (Release | Discussion) with serde-friendly YAML. Discussion requires discussion_category. Release uses release_tag (defaults to news id) and supports draft.
• Defaults: vox_publisher::contract centralizes site URL, feed path, and API bases.
• Templates: canonical Markdown lives under crates/vox-publisher/news-templates/ (embedded at compile time). Human-facing copies may exist under docs/news/templates/ but the crate directory is authoritative when they differ.

C. Maker–checker (two approvers) + “armed” gate

For live syndication (!orchestrator.news.dry_run and !item.syndication.dry_run):

1. VoxDb must be attached.
2. publication_approvals must contain two distinct approver values for the publication id + current content digest (content_sha3_256) (MCP: vox_news_approve and scientia publication tools).
3. publish_armed must be true in [orchestrator.news] or environment VOX_NEWS_PUBLISH_ARMED=1 (see env-vars.md).

If any check fails, NewsService skips the item (no publish, no published_news row).

D. Idempotency (published_news)

Before work, NewsService skips items whose published_news row matches the current content_sha3_256 (legacy NULL-digest rows still block until backfilled; digest-aware republish when body changes). Each publish attempt is recorded in publication_attempts (news_publish_attempts is legacy). After a successful live publish with no enabled-channel failures, mark_news_published stores the content digest plus GitHub, Twitter, and Open Collective ids, and the canonical publication state transitions to published.

E. Discovery

NewsService walks news_dir recursively by default (scan_recursive), so docs/news/drafts/*.md is picked up once drafts are under the configured tree.

3. MCP tools

Strict JSON input schemas are registered in vox-mcp input_schemas.rs.

4. Tests (no production posts)

• vox-publisher: dry_run_tests, local HTTP mock tests for X + Open Collective.
• vox-db: news_approval_tests for dual approval and published_news column mapping.