Human in the loop
Refusing to decide, and being refused
A queue only works if a person can say no to the question as well as to the request. 5 reasons are written down, 5 refusals have been taken on the record, and the queue itself refused 2 submissions at the point of decision.
The five refusals
Each one is a stated outcome that routes somewhere, not a silence.
What people actually did
Every accepted decision falls into exactly one of six outcomes.
What the queue refused to accept
2 submissions stopped by a rule
What the numbers say about the refusal path
All five reasons have been used at least once, so no part of the path is theoretical.
No single reason dominates. 5 reasons have been used 1 time each, across 5 refusals in total, so the record does not yet say which kind of question fails most often.
4 reasons require a written note before a submission is accepted: Insufficient evidence to decide · Wrong owner · The question is malformed · I have a conflict on this item. A refusal without a reason is a silence with a timestamp, which is the thing this path exists to prevent.
A refusal does not stop the clock. The item stays open, the deadline keeps running, and the routing sends it back to whoever can answer the objection. Only an approval or a rejection closes anything.
Actions
What is waiting on a person
A refusal is an outcome, not a silence. These counts are about the record of outcomes taken on the queue: which reasons have been used, which have never been, and which decisions cannot be reconstructed from the evidence spine.
decisions carry no evidence sequence
These were reconstructed from the source rows when the queue was assembled, so there is no spine entry behind them. Every decision taken through the queue from here writes one and shows the sequence against it.
items a person declined to decide
Each names a reason and routes somewhere specific. A refusal does not stop the clock on the item and does not close it; it returns it with the obstruction stated.
submissions the queue refused to accept
Each was stopped at submission under SOD-01, because the post attempting the decision is the post that raised the item. The attempt is on the record; the decision is not.
refusal reasons nobody has used yet
Every refusal reason on the register has been used at least once.
Operations
What this desk is allowed to start
A surface that only reports is not operable. This is the work this page can set in motion, and the bound it runs into.
Trigger and bound
What is on the record. 14 outcomes in total: 12 decisions taken and 2 attempts the queue would not accept. The five reasons. Insufficient evidence, wrong owner, malformed question, above the cap, and a declared conflict. Each routes to a different place, and none of them is a silent non-response. What a refusal does to the clock. Nothing. The window on the item keeps running while the obstruction is dealt with, which is why a refusal shows on the source page as well as here.
Live observability
What the record shows right now
The 2 outcomes below partition the 12 decisions the queue accepted. Attempts it refused to accept are counted separately above, because they are not decisions.
Current distribution
12 decisions
Is policy and strategy coming to fruition
Whether the written intent is holding here
Partly
Not holding on the record
The written intent is that a person can refuse to decide and that the refusal is treated as an outcome. That is now true: five reasons exist, 5 have been used, and each routes somewhere named rather than nowhere. What is not yet true is that the whole record is reconstructible. Every one of the 12 accepted decisions was rebuilt from source rows at assembly, so none of them has a spine sequence behind it.
What this page is, and what it is not
Decisions already on the record were reconstructed from the source rows at assembly and carry no spine sequence. A decision taken here writes one, and the sequence is shown against it.
The five reasons are a vocabulary we wrote, not a standard anyone publishes. They were chosen to cover the four ways a question can be unanswerable as put — the evidence is missing, the wrong post was asked, the question itself is malformed, or the answer is above the asked post’s authority — plus the case where answering would break a separation rule. If a person needs a sixth, the honest response is to add it, not to make them pick the nearest one.
Counts on this page are of decisions, not of items. One item can carry several decisions, and a blocked submission leaves a record even though it changed nothing.