Chapter 10
Reference
What to do when something is not working, and what each term means in one sentence.
Troubleshooting
Every entry below is a state the product can actually be in.
- The sign-in link has not arrived
- Check the spam folder first — a link that is delivered and filtered looks exactly like one that was never sent. Vigil answers every request the same way whether or not the address has an account, so the message on screen is not a statement about your address. If nothing arrives, request one more link and wait a few minutes; requesting many in a row is rate-limited and will slow you down rather than speed things up.
- The link says it is invalid or expired
- A sign-in link can be used once and expires fifteen minutes after it is issued. Following an older link from an earlier email, or following the same link twice, is refused by design. Request a new one.
- I am signed in but the workspace is empty
- Saved work belongs to the account it was made in. If you have more than one address, check that you signed in with the one you were working under. If the account is right and the desk is still empty, your Professional access may have ended — an account without an active subscription keeps its saved rows but cannot reach the surfaces that read them.Read more in your desk →
- My subscription ended and I want my work
- Cancelling ends the renewal; access continues to the end of the period already paid for. When it ends the workspace stops being reachable, and the saved rows are still there if access resumes. Deleting the account is what removes them, and deleting is deliberately refused while access is still running.Read more in your desk →
- A saved item says “no longer published”
- The canonical record it points at has been retired or superseded. This is the system working: your saved work holds a reference rather than a copy, so it tells you the ground moved instead of showing you something that has stopped being true. Open the item to see what it pointed at, and follow the successor if the record names one.Read more in method in use →
- A brief shows unresolved blocks
- The document panel counts them. An unresolved block is one whose record is no longer published; it prints a line saying so rather than vanishing, so a reader of the export can see that something was there. Remove the block, or replace it with the successor record.Read more in brief builder →
- A module has no Tempo
- Activity Tempo is maintained only where Vigil has an inclusion rule it would defend. Where a module has none, the Tempo rail is absent rather than empty. It is not a fault and it is never evidence about how much is happening in that theatre.Read more in monitor →
- Compare says NOT COMPARABLE
- The two records do not both carry that dimension. It is a result, not a failure: filling the cell in would produce a blank a reader would read as a zero. The row states the reason.Read more in analyse →
- A scenario implication is greyed out
- It is an authored rule whose conditions your current assumptions do not meet, shown rather than hidden so that you can see what the template holds and what it would take to reach it. Change an assumption and it becomes active.Read more in analyse →
- I followed something and nothing has arrived
- A follow delivers reviewed change. If the questions you follow were reviewed and held, there is nothing to send, and Vigil does not send a message to say a quiet week was quiet. The desk shows the reviews that happened either way.Read more in your desk →
- An export did not download
- Exports are generated in the browser and handed to it as a file. A pop-up or download blocker will stop that silently. Print and PDF open the browser’s own print dialogue, which some browsers restrict in private windows.Read more in brief builder →
- Something looks wrong in a record
- Write to Vigil. Corrections are made in place, dated and logged publicly, whether the error appeared in a free brief or in paid material — and a correction propagates into the collections, timelines and briefs that reference the record.Read more in method in use →
Anything not here, or anything that looks wrong in a record, goes to [email protected]. Corrections are made in place, dated and logged in the public corrections log.
Glossary
18 terms. Where the obvious misreading is the dangerous one, the entry says what the term is not.
- Baseline
- A question was opened and its condition recorded. Nothing has been reviewed against it yet, so there is nothing for it to have changed from.Monitor →
- Canonical record
- A published Vigil record with an id, a date and a page of its own — an event, a development, an actor, a location, a Watch question, an observable, a source. Every Professional surface composes these; none of them authors prose about them.How it works →
- Collection
- A named set of canonical records you assembled. It holds references, not copies, so its contents stay current when a record is reviewed.Your desk →
- Conditional implication
- What an authored rule says follows inside the recorded Vigil system if the assumptions you set held. It cites the records it rests on and states its own unknowns. It is not a prediction and carries no likelihood.Analyse →
- Covered zero
- A period an activity series was counting in, during which it recorded nothing. Drawn differently from a period the series does not cover, because “we counted none” and “we were not counting” are different statements.Monitor →
- Evidence entry
- A dated line beneath an observable naming the canonical development, event, Note or brief it rests on, and which way it bears. Directions never sum.Research →
- Follow
- A marker you put on a question, an observable, a series or a standing scope. It changes what is shown to you and what reaches you. It never changes how anything is reviewed or graded.Your desk →
- Lens
- A sector vocabulary — energy, maritime, political and the rest — that records declare. Reading through one shows what every module holds on that theme. A lens is not a separate database.Research →
- Met
- One of a question’s named observables occurred. It describes evidence, not success, and not the answer to the question.Monitor →
- No coverage
- An activity series does not measure in this period or at this marker. It is never evidence that nothing happened.Monitor →
- No material change
- A standing file was reviewed and nothing moved. A finding with a date and an author, not an absence of work.Monitor →
- Observable
- A record beneath a Watch question stating what is being checked, where the reading stands and in which register, what would constitute movement, and what the reading cannot establish.Research →
- Reading
- What an observable says today, on a stated date, in a stated register. It is the sentence a subscriber is being asked to rely on, and it always carries its own limits.Research →
- Register
- The standing of a statement, printed beside it: fact, assessment, user assumption, derived conditional implication, unknown, no coverage, no material change, or saved work.Method in use →
- Scenario template
- An authored set of conditions and rules over canonical records. You set the conditions; the template reports which parts of the record become relevant, affected or stressed, and publishes what it does not model.Analyse →
- Standing Watch scope
- A named exposure held across several canonical Watch questions at once, narrower than a module and wider than one question. It adds a selection and a stated relevance; it runs no second research process and produces no risk score.Monitor →
- Tempo
- Counts of dated, reported occurrences at published markers, under an inclusion rule the series states in full. Never severity, effect, risk, probability, threat or escalation.Monitor →
- Watch question
- A standing analytical question whose answer could materially change an assessment, with its current condition, the observable evidence that would move it, and a dated ledger of every review.Monitor →
Terms used across the whole of Vigil — confidence grades, evidence states, the date vocabulary, the map rules — are defined in the public glossary and the methodology.
Where the rest is written down
- What Vigil Professional is
- The product, what it costs, what it refuses to do, and the boundary between it and the free site.
- Vigil methodology
- What a claim, record, grade, date, map or Watch question means, and what Vigil deliberately does not publish.
- Professional terms
- What a subscription is, how it is billed and cancelled, and what it does not buy — including any influence over Vigil's analysis.
- Privacy notice
- Every piece of personal data an account involves, field by field.