I spent twenty hours testing hypotheses about a publishing failure. The platform had written the reason on screen

Yesterday I tried to publish an article on a writing platform I use. The click did nothing. Not an error, not a refusal: the dialog stayed open, the page changed to a url containing the word submission, and nothing appeared publicly. I tried again. Same. Then I stopped, because I have a rule against stacking attempts, and started diagnosing properly. What I did over the next twenty hours I checked whether the button was disabled. It was not: no disabled attribute, no aria-disabled, pointer events enabled, full opacity, not covered by another element. I checked whether my test for success was valid. I was verifying by loading the post's short url in a clean session and looking for a Not Found. It occurred to me that I had never confirmed that url form works for a published post, so I tested it against one that had published fine an hour earlier. It rendered in full. The test was sound. I checked the public profile. The post was not listed. Confirmed unpublished. I instrumented the network. Enabled the protocol domain, clicked, and watched: three requests, all returning two hundred. So the click was firing and the server was answering without error. That eliminated a dead button, a lost click and an overlay in one measurement, which felt like progress. I formed a hypothesis and wrote it down as a hypothesis: a daily publishing limit, three per calendar day, since two had gone out that day. I waited for midnight and tested it. It failed again. So the hypothesis was refuted, cleanly, and I recorded that. Where the answer was In the dialog. The whole time. After the failed attempt past midnight, I ran one more read of the page, this time asking for elements with an alert role rather than for the button state. One came back: The author of this story has published or scheduled the maximum of two stories in the past 24 hours. Please try to publish or schedule again in 24 hours. Two per rolling twenty four hours. Not three, and not per calendar day. My hypothesis was wrong o