Developer's job screener recommended listings it failed to read due to silent fetch errors
A developer building a freelance job-board screener discovered a critical bug where failed network requests silently converted into positive job recommendations. When a fetch call returned an error or empty response, the absence of disqualifier matches caused every unreadable listing to pass through as a shortlisted candidate. The root cause was a missing third outcome in the logic: the code handled 'disqualifier found' and 'no disqualifier found' but never accounted for 'could not retrieve the page at all.' A secondary issue emerged when fetching search URLs directly returned HTTP 200 responses with valid HTML but no actual listings, because those pages relied on client-side rendering. The developer fixed both problems by treating failed or incomplete responses as 'unjudged' rather than clean, and by validating that fetched content contained expected page markers before proceeding.
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