FAQ & Troubleshooting

What OLOBOLO does not prove

This section is mandatory reading before you rely on the chain — we sell evidence, and evidence has edges:

• Not code quality. The chain proves who authored, who reviewed and what CI reported — not that the code is good, secure or correct.
• Not legal conformity. Reports and mappings state what recorded evidence supports; they are never a legal opinion or a conformity assessment. Your counsel judges; our evidence feeds the judgment.
• Not what happened outside the record. An entry proves the recorded event; the absence of an entry proves only that nothing was recorded. That is why gaps surface as disclosed exceptions instead of being papered over — and why starting to record early matters: provenance cannot be reconstructed retroactively.
• Not the actor’s inner truth. Authored-By trailers record what the toolchain declared. A team determined to misdeclare authorship can — the chain then permanently records that declaration, at that time, which is precisely the evidence an investigation would want.

Common questions

What happens when I cancel? The chain stays, and export, verification, the /v/ page and the badge stay free — the evidence is yours, not a hostage. Paid features (reports, scale, API) stop; the dashboard falls back to the free tier’s 90-day view. Nothing is deleted.

Can OLOBOLO edit or delete my entries? No. The database refuses updates and deletes at the trigger level for every role including ours, and any tampering with history would break the hash chain visibly in every export ever downloaded — plus contradict the RFC 3161 anchors held by an independent TSA.

What about GDPR and personal data? The chain carries pseudonymous actor identifiers; identities live in a separate, erasable actor register. Erasure requests are honored by shredding the register entry — the chain’s hashes remain valid without exposing who the pseudonym was.

Does my source code ever leave my machine? Not through the CLI: it hashes the patch locally and sends fingerprints, paths and counts. The GitHub App path reads what GitHub already has, and still stores only metadata in the chain.

Troubleshooting

olobolo flush exits with code 3. Network failure — the buffer is intact and ordered. Fix connectivity and flush again; nothing was lost or reordered.

My commit didn’t appear in the chain. Run olobolo status: a buffered entry means network; no entry means the hook didn’t fire — re-run olobolo install-hooks and check that your hook manager chains correctly (the shim preserves existing hooks).

The verifier reports a broken entry. Take it seriously — that is the product working. Verify your download first (re-fetch the export), then compare with the organization’s own export. A genuine mismatch means the record was altered after the fact, and the breaking entry pinpoints where.

The badge shows “verification failing”. The badge renders chain state honestly, including bad states — that honesty is what makes it worth showing. Check the dashboard’s verification panel for the failing entry.