The release archive is public

Portail v1.6.1 is a small patch with a visible paper trail. The new version log is now part of the product instead of something that lives in commit messages, chat notes, or someone else's memory. Anyone can open /versions, read what shipped, follow a release into its own page, and see real screenshots from the update. It is simple on purpose. A release archive should not ask users to decode internal project history before they know what changed.

Each version page is built like a public changelog post, not a private engineering note. The page has a canonical URL, index and follow metadata, article-style Open Graph fields, Twitter card data, and BlogPosting structured data. The sitemap now lists both the archive and every individual release page, which makes the posts straightforward for search engines and answer engines to find. The public AI reference file also points at the archive, so the release history is visible to crawlers that read plain text context.

The patch also adds a deploy guardrail. Before a release goes out, Portail validates the version entries. A patch post must have more than 250 words, a minor post must have more than 500, and a major post must have more than 1,000. Every entry also needs at least one screenshot, and every screenshot path has to resolve to a real public image file. The same check runs locally through deploy.py and again on the production hook after checkout, before the client build starts.

That extra check is there because release notes are easy to skip when the actual feature work is already done. This makes the archive part of the shipping contract. If the page is missing, the post is too thin, or the screenshots were never captured, deployment stops early. v1.6.1 does not add a chat feature or interrupt users with a modal. It makes future releases harder to forget, easier to trust, and easier to discover.