We deleted 33 of our own news articles. Here is what was wrong with them.

We went through every article on the site today and deleted 33 of them. Nobody asked us to. Here is what they were and why they should never have been up. ## Articles about photos nobody here ever saw Back in June we had Reddit set up as a news feed. A photo post would come in, the headline would be whatever the Reddit user typed, and an AI would write about a picture it could not actually see. You can guess how that went. **They called strangers our members.** One article described an artist in Strasbourg as "one of our talented community members." That studio has never heard of us. Real, named, findable artists and studios were publicly described as ours — Antidote in Strasbourg, Crybaby in Frankfurt, Altar Tattoo in Calgary, Saltwater in Virginia Beach. If you are one of them and you found that page: we are sorry. It is gone. **One of them answered a safety question with a compliment.** The headline was a real question somebody asked: *"Are my second piercings too close?"* That is a question that matters — piercings set too close together can migrate, reject, and damage the tissue between them. Our article never answered it. It called the placement "a masterclass in minimalist chic" and told everyone reading to go for it. It was written by something that could not see the piercing. **One invented a person.** The headline said "brother and i got matching eyebrows." The article confidently described "the brother and sister team," and then described eyebrow piercings as a tattoo. **One got the meaning of a Hannya mask backwards.** Our article said it was "a symbol of good luck and prosperity in Japanese culture." It is not. The Hannya mask is a jealous, vengeful demon — a woman consumed by rage. On a site where people decide what to put on their body permanently, that is not a small mistake. Twenty-three of these came down. ## Two articles sending people to events that were wrong One promoted a "Mid-Atlantic Tattoo Convention" at a named casino in Maryland on specific dates. We could not find that convention anywhere — not the venue, not the promoter, not the name. Somebody could have driven there. Another gave the wrong weekend *and* the wrong venue for the Seattle Tattoo Expo. The real one is August 14–16 at Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. Our article said late July at a venue that has not been called that in years. Both gone. The convention pages themselves were rebuilt and sourced yesterday, and they are right. ## Eight articles that were just a headline Teasers that summarised somebody else's article and stopped. One was 406 characters about **architecture in Ghent, Belgium** — nothing to do with tattooing. One was a stranger's personal dispute with their artist, republished as if we had reported it. If a headline brings you in and there is nothing behind it, you do not come back. Fair enough. ## Two things we fixed in the plumbing Text coming in from outside feeds was not being unpacked properly, so some articles showed raw code like `…` in the middle of a sentence. Fixed, and the seven articles carrying it were repaired. While fixing that we found the obvious version of the fix would have opened a security hole, so we did it the safe way round and wrote tests that fail loudly if anyone ever "simplifies" it back. We are not going to explain that one in detail, for obvious reasons. ## Where that leaves it 487 articles, down from 520. The checks that catch this now run automatically, so a bad batch cannot quietly come back. We would rather have 487 you can trust than 520 where you have to guess which ones we made up.