Feed status is not a guess

There is a specific screen every agency system has, and almost all of them get it wrong in the same way. It is the one that tells you whether your listing reached the portal.

The two questions it conflates

Did we send it, and did they take it. These are different events, separated by a network and by whatever the portal decided to do when it read the payload.

A screen that answers the first and displays it as the second is not lying exactly. It is reporting the last thing it observed and letting the label imply the next thing. The result is a green state on a listing nobody can find, and a phone call from a vendor who has been looking.

Three states, not two

The honest version needs three.

Sent. We handed it over and we are waiting.

Acknowledged. They answered, and here is the identifier they gave it, at this time.

Quiet. We handed it over and nothing came back, and here is how long it has been.

Two-state screens collapse the third into the first, so a feed that has stopped answering looks the same as a feed that answered a second ago. That is the failure worth designing against, because a broken feed and a slow morning produce identical screens right up until somebody notices the listing is missing.

Why it takes effort to get right

Because the third state is only visible if you record the acknowledgement separately from the send, and keep the clock running between them. If your data model has one status column on the listing, you cannot express it. You will find yourself writing a status called sent that quietly means we tried, and by then the screen has already taught everyone to trust it.

What we do

One row per attempt, the acknowledgement stored with the identifier the portal returned, and the elapsed time since the last one visible on the status screen.

A feed with no recent acknowledgement reads as quiet, with the time of the last one. It does not read as healthy. An empty result and a broken connection are different sentences, and a system that renders the second as the first has taught you to stop looking at exactly the moment you should start.