The interval gate has no override, so a page you know has just changed cannot
be fetched until six hours after the last attempt. The only workaround was
deleting snapshots/<id>.state.json, which also wipes consecutiveFailures and
lastConfirmedAt — resetting the broken-source streak and making the footer age
every source from when its bytes last changed rather than when we last
confirmed them. A flag that says what it means is better than a side effect
nobody documented.
It sets aside the interval and nothing else. Conditional headers still go out,
which is what makes forcing defensible at all: the host is asked, not
re-served, and an unchanged page costs it a 304. Per-host spacing, robots, one
request per source and the no-retry rule all still apply — a source that was
not due and is also disallowed stays skipped, for the reason that matters.
Refused under CI, like --assume-robots-on-403 and for the same reason: a
schedule that forces every cycle is a shorter interval with extra steps, and
the interval is the obligation, not the default. So AGENTS.md § Scraping
conduct is amended rather than left to be quietly contradicted by a flag.
Every source asked early is named in summary.forced and warned about. A run
that was due anyway is never reported as forced — a summary that cried "forced"
on an ordinary run would train the reader to ignore the word.
Also repoints the "unknown flag" test, which used --force as its example and
stopped testing anything the moment --force existed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
