Changelog

What has changed on CLT Explorer, in the order it changed, written for people who use the site rather than people who build it.

Read this bit first. The Charlotte guide is pre-launch. There are no version numbers here and none anywhere else, because nothing has been tagged as a release yet — tagging 1.0.0 before a thing is public would be a version number pretending to be a promise. What follows is therefore grouped by the day the work landed, taken from the project's own history, and it starts on 2026-08-13, the day the Charlotte edition began. Once the guide is public this page will switch to real versions, and this note will be the first thing to go.

Entries follow Keep a Changelog: Added, Changed, Fixed, Removed.

Updated: 2026-08-20

Contents

• Unreleased
• 2026-08-20
• 2026-08-19
• 2026-08-18
• 2026-08-17
• 2026-08-15
• 2026-08-13
• Known and not yet fixed

Unreleased

Work in hand, listed here so it is not a surprise when it appears.

Changed

• The Mint Coin amounts are marked as placeholders pending a balancing pass. A rebalance will change what future actions pay, never what you already hold.
• Six of the seven arcade cabinets still wear placeholder artwork borrowed from other games. The games are finished; the icons are not.

Added

• Advertising on the Charlotte edition remains closed while the question of which categories North Carolina permits is under legal review. /advertise says so rather than quoting terms it cannot stand behind.

2026-08-20

Added

• The Atlas — a public gallery of every drawn figure on the site, each with its Roman numeral and its name.
• The Core Sample replaced the old scrolling timeline at /history/timeline. The previous instrument was an 18,000-pixel spine whose axis was deliberately bent to compensate for uneven density; the new one shows the density instead of hiding it, and brushes. The complete record still sits beneath it as text, so nothing became reachable only by running code.
• The Vein became the default view at /graph — a three-level semantic zoom over the knowledge graph laid on the city's real shape. The original spring canvas survives as an easter egg.
• The Loom at /graph/loom, The Ledger at /graph/ledger, The Roundhouse on /districts, and the Holdings Sunburst as the hero of /browse.
• The Sluice joined The Assay on /colophon: one weighs the bibliography, the other washes every dated fact through era, lens, weight and confidence.
• The Register — the sortable coverage table at the foot of /places, whose footer tallies the guide's own gaps rather than hiding them.
• Service times surfaced at /worship from research the directory already held, plus three more congregations.

Changed

• The near-me map moved off the home page and onto the neighborhood arrival pages, where "what's around here" is a real question rather than a decorative one.
• The Seam's tree was spread out so its branches stop overlapping at the trunk.

Fixed

• Three pieces of shipped copy inherited from this network's first city — a coastal "island" in the graph presets, the geography in the /browse introduction, and an out-of-town example in the search documentation.

2026-08-19

Added

• The activity cloud on the home page — "What do you feel like doing?" — which opens categories in place rather than growing indented rows, and never offers you a word with nothing behind it.
• Answered questions on place pages, researched from primary sources: 96 places now carry a Q&A block, and the same answers feed the page's structured data, so the two cannot disagree.
• The Seam at /graph/seam — the record as a hyperbolic tree with time as the trunk.
• Branded 404 and error pages, and loading states on the two slowest routes.

Changed

• The seasonal model was rebuilt around one year-round answer plus real exceptions, and 341 mechanical copies of the same seasonal profile were deleted. Charlotte does not have an off-season, and a data model that assumed one was telling visitors something false about the city.
• Cuisine became a real facet: 48 places, 19 genuine cuisine facets, and six official websites the research pass turned up on the way.
• /trip is no longer blank without JavaScript — it renders the starter Saturday as real, linked prose.

Fixed

• Reduced-motion settings now apply to the map camera; several dark-theme contrast failures; three places that were in the guide twice.
• The Blue Line end-to-end ride time was reconciled against the published timetable.

2026-08-18

The heaviest research day in the project's history — the guide grew from 254 place records to 346.

Added

• Ten survey lanes of new places: the west side (and with it the 22nd neighborhood), lodging, international corridors along South Boulevard and North Tryon, live-music venues, recreation, coffee at city scale, sacred spaces, markets and food halls, and two arcs of day trips.
• /bus — nine bus corridors, evidenced against the agency's own schedule data, joined to the places along them.
• /airport, and a live lake layer for the Catawba chain with real gauge readings.
• Deep cuts on 38 places, and access, family and trail notes on 40.
• Markdown twins for every content route — a plain-text version of any page.
• The city limits, from the Census, on the home page map.
• Game day at /teams: four clubs, the whole day planned, and a deals layer built to North Carolina's rules.

Changed

• Records now say what they cannot establish. Address conflicts, zip-code conflicts and schedule conflicts found during research are recorded on the record rather than resolved by picking one. The first structured conflict of this kind was Kings Drive's opening hours.
• Several places were deliberately withheld rather than published when their sourcing would not hold up — and the reason was recorded rather than the record quietly dropped.

Fixed

• Address formatting was unified behind one composer across seven places that had each been doing it their own way.
• A stale count in a place-page header that a test caught because the site derives the live number and the header did not.

2026-08-17

Added

• Every one of the 677 history facts was graded for importance, which is what lets the timeline draw density honestly and the highlights tier rank at all.
• The last three curated tours landed, bringing the total to 13 — including one that is three stops long because three is what the evidence supports, and says so in its own blurb.
• Practical facts at scale: 58 menu links, 42 hours notes, 26 booking notes, 22 menu-anchored price bands and 13 parking realities, every one from the venue's own site.
• The first real photographs on place pages, with credits.

Changed

• A whisky tag was removed from a bar at the owner's own correction — it had rested on the guide's own description of the place rather than on evidence — and the description was rewritten with the correction's hedge intact.

2026-08-15

The day the Charlotte edition stopped being a copy of a coastal town.

Added

• The CityLYNX Gold Line as the second rail spine: 17 platforms, west to east.
• /birds — 73 species, from a university checklist.
• Seven arcade cabinets, all new and all cut from Charlotte's own history: Shiny Rock Hunt, Gold Line Operator, The Trading Path, The Foundry, Franchise, Cabin Constructor and the crossword.
• The Day trips ring — everything from the I-485 loop outward — defined as a neighborhood in its own right.
• 13 historical-site records including the Excelsior Club, recorded as demolished in July 2026.

Changed

• The colour scheme became Charlotte's, taken from the city flag, the state flag and the teams.
• The browse axes were re-cut for a city rather than a beach town: the old "By Street" axis, which had been numbered blocks running to the ocean, became By Neighborhood.

Fixed

• A history page that told another city's founding story under Charlotte's name. This was reported by a reader and is the single worst class of error this project can make; it is why the guide now runs an automated check for the other city's vocabulary on every build.
• The map's bounds were still the coastal box, which clamped Charlotte back onto the Delmarva coast.
• Tide readings were removed from /today for a city 200 miles from the sea.

Removed

• The previous city's entire arcade — seven cabinets — deleted outright rather than re-skinned.

2026-08-13

Added

• The Charlotte edition began: the city configuration, the 26-station LYNX Blue Line spine taken verbatim from the agency's own schedule data, the sourcing policy, and the frame — what counts as Charlotte, how far a day trip reaches, and how often facts get re-checked.

Known and not yet fixed

Listed here so you find them from us rather than the hard way. Fuller versions of each are in troubleshooting.

• Two open trip-planner tabs overwrite each other, silently and without warning. Plan in one tab.
• The search box on the results page does nothing with JavaScript disabled. Use the navigation bar's box, which works.
• A Gold Line station filter can be dropped when a shared search link is reopened.
• Deep cuts do not appear on place pages yet — only in search results and in the plain-text version of a page.
• There is no structured accessibility data at all, so the Accessibility map layer has nothing to select.
• The history archive has no public correction log. Corrections are made; they are not announced. The news layer's register at /news/corrections covers the news layer only.