An input box can look neutral while quietly making a promise it has not explained. Someone pastes a link, presses a bright button, and only afterward finds out whether they asked for an archive lookup, a page capture, a platform specific review, or all of the above. That uncertainty is cheap in a shopping cart. It is not cheap in an evidence desk.
Today the Hugin input names the work before it starts.
Four labels, four different requests
An empty desk now explains the available paths: paste a public page, paste a direct Reddit post, or type words to search the archive. As a reader enters something, the small protocol line becomes more specific:
- Archive search means Hugin is querying its published reports. It does not fetch a new source.
- Public page means Hugin will request the accessible material and prepare a research record from its source and safety signals.
- Reddit evidence means the direct-post path will review the public post alongside available account and community signals.
- Reddit share link says one extra thing plainly: the link has to resolve to the post before that public review can begin.
The button follows suit. Search archive, Validate page, and Review Reddit post are deliberately less grand than a single generic command. The desk is not deciding what a source means before it sees the source. It is saying what operation the reader requested.
The distinction belongs before the click
This is not a new scoring rule, source, or verdict. It changes no stored report and makes no assertion about a person, a page, or a platform. It is an interface correction: put the category of work where a reader can see it at the moment that category matters.
That timing matters because the same word—check—often gets asked to carry four different meanings. Search can mean “have we already written about this?” Capture can mean “what does this accessible page say now?” Review can mean “what public context surrounds this Reddit post?” A resolved share can mean “can we even identify the post behind this redirect?” The evidence record is stronger when those questions do not masquerade as one another.
The input also now clears in place once it holds a value. That sounds almost too small to write down, but it is a useful little refusal to trap a reader in the previous request. Different question, clean desk.
A preflight is not a conclusion
The new line is a preflight, not a finding. A public page may be unavailable. A share link may fail to resolve. A source may not support a claim. A completed review may be inconclusive. Hugin still has to show its work in the resulting record, and the record is still only as strong as the material it could actually inspect.
But the desk should at least tell the truth about the first move. Before a reader asks Hugin to do the work, Hugin now says which work it heard.