gacha-event-tracker/docs/INGESTION.md

Ingestion Pipeline

Six stages, run per source. Every stage writes its outcome to ingest_runs so a failure two days ago can be diagnosed without re-running.

fetch → parse → merge → validate → reconcile → gate → publish
                                                  │
                                                  └──► quarantine

No LLM

Event data is extracted by deterministic code only. There is no model call anywhere in this pipeline, no API key, and no per-run cost.

This is a deliberate constraint, not an omission:

• A source that cannot be parsed deterministically does not get an adapter. Report it rather than reaching for inference.
• Parser output is reproducible — the same fixture always yields the same events, which is what makes the fixture tests meaningful.
• Iterating is free and offline: bun run parse <adapter-id> <fixture>.

If a source's markup is too unstable to parse, the answer is a different source, not a model.

Three layers: parsers, adapters, merge

The layering is what makes a second, third, or tenth source cheap.

Layer	Answers	Lives in	Scope
Parser	"How is this site laid out?"	src/ingest/parsers/	One site template, many games
Adapter	"Which URL, for which game, via which parser?"	src/ingest/adapters/index.ts	One page
Merge	"These sources disagree — now what?"	src/ingest/merge.ts	One game, many sources

Consequences worth internalising:

• Adding a source for a site already parsed = one entry in SOURCES. No new parsing code.
• Adding a new site = one parser module + its PARSERS entry, then adapters as above.
• A game may have any number of sources. parseGame(game, documents, now) runs them all and merges.

Parsers in the tree

Parser	Site	Sources using it
game8	game8.co article calendars	Genshin, Star Rail, Wuthering Waves, ZZZ, Endfield, NTE, Infinity Nikki, Persona 5: The Phantom X
wikigg	wiki.gg MediaWiki mp-event templates	Endfield
akwiki	arknights.wiki.gg's mrfz-wtable "Ongoing/upcoming" table	Arknights
fandom	Fandom wikis via the MediaWiki action=parse API — Event | Time Period | Version wikitables	Reverse: 1999

wikigg is the better shape by a distance: it emits ISO timestamps with one timer per server region, so its events carry exact precision and real regionEnds. Prefer a source like that over a prose wiki when both exist, and give it a higher priority.

fandom is the only parser whose body is not HTML: it reads an action=parse JSON envelope and takes the rendered wikitext out of parse.text. That is not a preference — the rendered page is behind a Cloudflare challenge and the API is the surface the wiki's robots.txt allows, so the adapter's URL is an API call and the stored snapshot is JSON despite its .html name (every body snapshots/ keeps is named <id>.html, whatever its content type). Its canParse therefore checks the envelope as well as the table, because an error payload or a challenge page must fail loudly rather than parse to zero events. Two page facts drive the rest of it:

• The title is the row's <b>, never the cell text. The cell leads with a banner image, and a missing image renders as a red link reading File:<Event> Banner.png — which a cell-text reader publishes as the event's name.
• These pages are archives, not schedules. All five tables list every event since version 1.1 (154 rows, six of them unfinished when the fixture was captured), with no "ongoing" section to anchor on. Inclusion is therefore decided against ctx.now, the one parser here that does so; akwiki and game8 can gate on a heading instead, and should where one exists.

akwiki shares a host family with wikigg and nothing else — arknights.wiki.gg has no mp-event cards, so the two are separate modules rather than one parser with a branch. Two things about that page shape are worth knowing before touching it:

• Every row states two schedules, CN and Global, about five months apart. Only Global is published. A row with no Global line yields no event rather than borrowing the CN one.
• Only the next boundary is machine-readable. The countdown sits on the end while an event runs and on the start while it is still upcoming, so one side is exact and the other is the table's date — and which is which flips when the event goes live. An exact instant is therefore accepted only when it falls on the same UTC day as the date beside it, because startsAt.slice(0, 10) is part of the event ID and a start that moved a day would orphan every completion mark on the morning the event began.

Date formats understood

All live in src/ingest/dates.ts, each returning null rather than inferring anything:

Function	Shape	Seen on
parseMonthDayYear	August 12, 2026	Genshin detail rows
parseMonthDayRange	August 12 - September 21, 2026 (year on the end only)	Genshin, NTE
parseFullRange	Aug. 14, 2026 - Aug. 24, 2026 (a year each side)	Star Rail, Wuthering Waves
parseShortSlashRange	08/09/26 - 08/30/26	Endfield
parseSlashDateTimeRange	2021/01/16 04:00 - 2021/01/31 03:59	Genshin past events
parseLabelledStartEnd	Start: January 24, 2025 End: Permanent	Infinity Nikki
parseAdjacentFullRange	July 30, 2026 August 13, 2026 (halves split by an <hr>)	Persona 5: The Phantom X
parseYearFirstSlashRange	2026/07/30 – 2026/08/20 (year first, so field order is not inferred)	Arknights
parseOrdinalDateTimeRange	November 9th, 05:00 - December 4th, 2023, 04:59 (UTC-5) (ordinal days, stated offset)	Reverse: 1999
parseOpenRange	Jul. 24, 2026 - End of 4.6, July 10, 2026 - Permanent	Star Rail, Wuthering Waves

parseOpenRange is tried last because it is the most permissive — it accepts any leading full date and reports no end.

The last two are anchored at both ends and require a year on each half, which is what keeps them from eating prose. August 12, 2026 Day 3 rewards are doubled would otherwise read "Day 3" as an end, and June 25, 2026 July 16/30, 2026 names two candidate ends — so it takes neither, and the leftover is not shown as a summary either (a date the parser refused to trust must not reappear dressed as information).

The parser interface

export interface SourceParser {
  id: string;                                   // "game8"
  label: string;                                // "Game8"
  canParse(html: string): boolean;              // structural sanity check
  parse(html: string, ctx: ParseContext): GachaEvent[];
}

canParse is the redesign tripwire. Without it, a site rewrite makes every selector miss and the parser returns zero events — which reads downstream as "this game has no events" rather than as a failure. The adapter throws when canParse is false, so the run fails loudly and the previously published events stay put.

Keep canParse structural, not content-based, and do not over-fit it. Game8's own pages differ in attribute quote style (class="a-table" on Genshin, class='a-table' on NTE), which is exactly the kind of variation a naive check gets wrong. Every regex in html.ts is attribute-agnostic for the same reason.

The adapter registry

const SOURCES: SourceSpec[] = [
  { id: "genshin-game8-events", game: "genshin",
    url: "https://game8.co/games/Genshin-Impact/archives/301601", parserId: "game8" },
  { id: "nte-game8-events", game: "nte",
    url: "https://game8.co/games/Neverness-to-Everness/archives/592073", parserId: "game8" },
];

priority (default 0) breaks ties when two sources disagree and neither is clearly better — give official feeds a higher number than community wikis. Adapter ids are "<game>-<site>-<page>" and are recorded on every event as sourceId, so any row in the feed traces back to the source that produced it.

Assessing a new source

Source shape	Verdict
JSON API, or an HTML table with consistent headers	Good — write the adapter
Label/value or column tables with full dates including a year	Good — an existing parser may already handle it
Dates without a year, or no end date at all	Unsupportable — yields nothing rather than guessing
Free-form prose with no table structure	Find a different source
A clean table whose newest row is months old	Not a source, an archive. Check the latest date before writing anything: bluearchive.fandom.com parses perfectly and yields zero live events, which shows up as an empty lane and a permanently rejected snapshot rather than as an error

Game8 uses at least four page templates and a game's page may use any of them:

1. Label/value detail tables — Event Start / Event End rows under a per-event h3, full dates with year. (Genshin Impact)
2. Column tables — Event | Duration | Event Details | Rewards, one row per event, under a section heading. (Neverness to Everness)
3. Image-grid schedules — a bare MM/DD, no year, no end date. Unsupportable.
4. Combined cells — one cell holding label, range and blurb (Period: 08/09/26 - 08/30/26 During the event...). (Arknights: Endfield)
5. Rowspan Start/End pairs — the event name spans two rows, so a flat cell reader sees [title, "Start", date] then ["End", date]. (Zenless Zone Zero)
6. Labelled cells — one cell holding Start: <date> and End: <date> split by a <br>, where the end half is often the word Permanent. (Infinity Nikki)
7. <hr>-separated pairs — a Event | Duration table whose two dates are divided by a rule rather than a dash, so a tag-stripping reader sees only whitespace between them. The same page repeats each live event under its own h3 with Start Date / End Date rows and a paragraph of prose; those corroborate the dates and supply the blurb the flat table lacks. (Persona 5: The Phantom X)

Shapes 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 are handled. Before assuming a new Game8 page will work, dump its heading/table structure and check which shape it uses — and check every table, not just the obvious one. Endfield was written off as undatable on a first pass that only inspected its Duration rows; its two real events were in a table further down.

Check what ends a section, too. Headings decide inclusion and the level is not consistent: Persona 5 puts its whole finished back catalogue behind an <h4>Finished Events</h4> inside a collapsed accordion, so a reader that ignores h4 publishes fifty dead events. Genshin uses h4 the opposite way — for sub-headings within one event ("Availability Period") — so an unrecognised h4 gates the section but must never claim the event title.

Stage 1 — fetch

• Send If-None-Match / If-Modified-Since from sources.etag / last_modified. A 304 ends the run as skipped_unchanged.
• User-Agent: gacha-event-tracker/1.0 (+https://github.com/<owner>/gacha-event-tracker).
• Honor robots.txt; cache parsed robots per host for 24h. Fail closed — a robots.txt that 5xxs or times out means "do not fetch", because a permission we could not read is not a permission we have. A 404 means no restrictions.
• 20s timeout. No retries: a retry is a second request, and AGENTS.md § Scraping conduct says one per source per cycle. A failed source waits for the next cycle instead.
• Only 200 is a page (plus 304 for "unchanged"). Not response.ok — that admits the whole 2xx range, and 202 Accepted is what an edge bot-manager answers with while it serves a challenge instead of the wiki. Admitting it fed that challenge page to the parser, which reported "yielded 0 events" — the symptom, with the status that explained it unmentioned. 204 has no body and 206 is a fragment; none of them is a document.
• Space requests to a host we have already asked this cycle — the host's Crawl-delay if it states one, else DEFAULT_HOST_GAP_MS (2s). The wait is taken after the interval and robots gates, so a source we then skip costs nothing.
• Store raw bytes in snapshots/<source-id>.html, with hash/ETag/Last-Modified alongside it.

On failure: increment the failure streak, leave published events untouched, end as failed. A source being down never mutates the feed. A non-ok status also records what turned us away — the Server header, whether a CF-Ray was present, any Retry-After — because a bare HTTP 403 reads identically whether the page moved behind a login or a CDN decided the runner is a bot farm.

The failure streak is read, not just written. consecutiveFailures reaching BROKEN_AFTER_FAILURES (3, so ~36h at two cycles a day) promotes a source from "down" to broken: annotated on the run page, listed in the job summary with its status code, and counted in the broken step output that refresh.yml fails on after committing. See AGENTS.md § Scraping conduct for why that ordering is load-bearing.

Built: scripts/refresh-sources.ts (bun run refresh), scheduled by .github/workflows/refresh.yml. It takes its adapters, store, robots gate, fetch and clock by injection, so the whole runner is tested offline against a fake fetch. A fetched body is rejected — the previous snapshot survives — when it fails canParse, throws, or yields zero events; storing an empty parse would make the feed build prefer it over the fixture and silently empty a game's calendar. One source down is a warning and exit 0; every source failing is exit 1, so CI never commits a cycle that learned nothing.

Stage 2 — parse

Hash the raw body (sha256) → content_hash. If it matches sources.content_hash, end as skipped_unchanged and do no further work.

Otherwise call adapter.parse(html, ctx), which runs canParse and then the parser. Because parsers are pure, this stage is fully reproducible offline against the stored snapshot:

bun run parse <adapter-id> fixtures/<game>/<source>-<date>.html

Watch the event count. A source that changes date format or table shape makes events vanish with no error — the parser simply matches nothing. Compare each run's events_seen against the previous run and flag a large drop. A source that went from 13 events to 2 has broken, not quieted down. This is the most likely real failure mode of a parser-only pipeline, and nothing else surfaces it.

Stage 2.5 — sanitize

Everything a parser returns came from a page we do not control, and it is about to become React text, JSON on disk, a localStorage key and eventually a SQLite row. src/ingest/sanitize.ts is the trust boundary, applied in toAdapter()'s parse wrapper in src/ingest/adapters/index.ts — the one seam every source passes through, so a source added tomorrow is sanitized without its author doing anything and no parser can opt out. It runs after canParse and before validation.

What it does: removes script/style/comment content and residual tags; decodes entities to a fixed point so <script> cannot resurrect as markup in a later decoder; NFKC-normalizes; strips control, zero-width and bidi-override characters (an RTL override visually spoofs a title); collapses whitespace; truncates to the schema's own caps at a word boundary; and requires sourceUrl to be absolute http(s), falling back to the source's registered URL rather than dropping the event.

Three constraints it holds:

• It never touches a date. Not a timestamp, not a precision, not regionEnds. Dates are the product's promise and the sanitizer's job stops at prose and URLs.
• It cleans rather than drops. The only drop is a title that sanitizes to nothing, and every repair and drop emits a note whose default sink is console.warn — silence is not something a future caller gets for free (§ Silent drops).
• It does not move event IDs. An ID is recomputed only when sanitizing actually changed the title and the incoming ID was minted the standard way. All eleven fixtures pass through with zero repairs and byte-identical output, which is the regression guard: IDs are localStorage keys and moving one orphans a reader's marks with no server-side recovery.

Stage 3 — merge

Only meaningful when a game has more than one source; a single-source game passes straight through.

mergeEvents(groups) compares events across sources:

1. Same ID → same event; keep the higher-confidence copy.
2. Near match — same game, title similarity ≥ 0.80, starts within 24h — → same event under different titles; keep the higher-confidence copy.
3. Otherwise → distinct events; keep both.

Title similarity alone would merge a rerun with its original, since reruns reuse the name. The start-date proximity check is the actual guard; the title threshold is deliberately loose (0.80) so that "Stygian Onslaught" and "Stygian Onslaught Event" collapse into one row rather than showing the user a duplicate.

Agreement raises confidence (+0.10) only across different sourceIds. The same row seen twice in one document is not corroboration.

Disagreement is surfaced, never averaged. Two sources whose endsAt differ by more than 24 hours produce a conflicts entry; the pipeline routes those to quarantine. Splitting the difference between two dates would produce a value neither source asserts — the worst possible answer for a product whose promise is date accuracy.

Stage 4 — validate

Zod parse against GachaEvent, then calendar sanity rules. Anything failing a hard rule goes to quarantine with reason: 'sanity_failed' — never to the feed.

Hard rules (reject):

Rule	Rationale
endsAt after startsAt when both present	A backwards interval is always a parse error
Duration under 180 days	Patch cycles are ~6 weeks; longer means a misread year
startsAt within [now − 2y, now + 1y]	Catches century typos and relative-date misreads
endsAt null exactly when endPrecision is "unknown"	The two fields must agree
regionEnds non-null exactly when regionScoped	Same
All regionEnds values within 24h of each other	Region resets differ by hours, not days
title non-empty, ≤ 200 chars, not a placeholder	Catches header rows scraped as events

Rules 1, 4, and 5 are enforced by GachaEvent itself in src/shared/schema.ts, so they cannot be bypassed by constructing an event object directly.

Soft rules (reduce confidence, do not reject):

• Duration under 1 hour or over 60 days → −0.2
• Title very similar to another event in the same batch → −0.15 (likely a duplicate row)

Stage 5 — reconcile

Diff validated candidates against currently published events.

1. Exact ID match → compare fields. Unchanged: no-op. Changed: update.
2. Near match → update the existing event, keeping the existing ID. This is what survives a wiki renaming an event without orphaning every user's completion mark.
3. No match → new event.
4. Published event absent from this run → mark status = 'delisted'. Never delete.

Conflict detection. A candidate moving an already-published endsAt by more than 24 hours is a date_conflict. The user may have planned around the old date, so route it to quarantine regardless of confidence.

Scoring

Confidence records how firmly the sources pinned an event down, so the gate can hold back weak cases. The parser assigns a base score; merge and reconcile adjust it.

base                                          0.95
−0.05  a boundary is day-precision rather than exact
−0.15  the end date is unknown (endsAt null)
+0.10  an independent source corroborates
+0.15  identical event parsed in a previous run
−0.20  any soft rule fired
−0.30  a date_conflict against a published event

Clamp to [0, 1]. CONFIDENCE_THRESHOLD (default 0.8) is the gate. Under the current parser a day-precision event with a known end scores 0.85 and publishes, while one with an unknown end scores 0.75 and is held — the intended bias.

Stage 6 — gate and publish

Condition	Destination
Confidence at or above threshold, no conflict	publish
Confidence below threshold	quarantine, low_confidence
Cross-source or cross-run date disagreement	quarantine, date_conflict
Failed a hard rule	quarantine, sanity_failed
Shape the schema does not recognise	quarantine, novel_shape

A quarantined event does not block its siblings — if eight pass and two are held, the eight publish.

Publish upserts by ID in a transaction. Bump version and updatedAt only when a field actually changed, or the freshness badge (PRD F7) becomes meaningless. Update sources.content_hash, etag, last_success_at, and reset consecutive_failures.

The review gate

Quarantined events surface at GET /review on the admin listener (127.0.0.1:ADMIN_PORT). See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md § Why /review needs no auth.

• POST /api/review/:id/approve — writes to events with extraction_method: 'manual', confidence: 1.0. Approving with edits is supported; the corrected value publishes.
• POST /api/review/:id/reject — stamps resolution only. The candidate is held again next run if the source has not changed, which is intended.

Quarantine depth is the pipeline's health signal. A growing queue means a source changed shape. /api/health exposes the count.

Testing

Every adapter ships:

1. fixtures/<game>/<source>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.html — a real captured page.
2. fixtures/<game>/<source>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.expected.json — the exact GachaEvent[] it produces.
3. A test running parse against the fixture with a pinned ctx.now, asserting deep equality.

bun test must pass with no network access.

Regenerating .expected.json from the parser makes the test self-consistent, not correct. After an intentional change, re-verify a sample against the live page — and ideally extract the same data a second way (a throwaway script over the fixture) to confirm counts and dates independently. That independent check is what caught the exact event counts for both current adapters.

When a source changes shape, capture a new fixture alongside the old one and keep both — the old fixture is the regression test proving the parser still handles the previous format.

test/dates.test.ts covers the cases that matter most: a missing year returns null rather than guessing, impossible calendar dates are rejected, ranges crossing New Year roll the start year back, and abbreviated months parse. test/merge.test.ts covers cross-source agreement, disagreement, and rerun disambiguation. These are the last line of defense before a wrong date reaches a user.