← Errata — Major Public-Record Changes
2026-05-18
Private email username removed 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.
A subsequent secondary slip. While building the public errata page itself (this very page’s predecessor), the local-part of the affected address was inadvertently typed back into the page content during drafting. The mistake was caught and fixed within minutes: the page content was edited, redeployed, and the deploy repositories’ git history was scrubbed a second time. This entry, in its current form, reflects the corrected state.