Do the links go where they say?
Every page on this site cites the city's own record ā 6,181 distinct links into the city's portals. A link that fails is an annoyance; a link that resolves to the wrong document is worse, because nobody notices. The two worst bugs in this site's history were exactly that: links that returned a page, just not the promised one. So this audit never trusts a status code ā every external link is checked against the content it was cited for.
What we checked
| Link kind | Verified | The check |
|---|---|---|
| IQM2 document downloads (FileOpen) | 3,542/3,543 | the served bytes must be a valid PDF whose sha256 matches the hash we recorded when we first fetched it |
| IQM2 item pages (Detail_LegiFile) | 2,489/2,489 | the live page must display the tracking code (or title) of the item whose page links it |
| PrimeGov portal items | 149/149 | the portal's own search API, queried with the item's title, must return the linked item id |
The crawl is polite (single request at a time, throttled) and resumable; verdicts above span 2026-07-17 ā 2026-07-17. PDF baselines are sha256 hashes recorded when each document was first archived.
The internal half: checked on every build
Before any deploy, an offline audit reads all 21,193 built pages and proves three things: every item page's title declares the same docket code its address encodes; every link whose visible text claims a code (“POR 2025 #165”) points at that item's page; and every city-portal link on an item page agrees with our database about which record it opens ā 67,506 identity-bearing links in the current build, 0 findings. A single failure blocks the deploy. Last run 2026-07-19 Ā· audit code.
The altered document
One document of the 3,543 we hash-checked came back with different bytes than the city served when we archived it: the final loan order on CMA 2019 #104 ($10M, Tobin/Vassal Lane Upper School reconstruction, adopted May 20, 2019). We compared our archived copy against the live file. The only difference is a removed watermark line ā the original carried an “Evaluation Only. Created with Aspose.Words” stamp from the city's PDF software; the copy the city serves now is the same document re-rendered without it. Every substantive word, the votes, and the document's own metadata are identical. We keep both copies, and the comparison is recorded alongside them. It is the only altered document this audit has found.
Every exception (1)
| URL | Verdict | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| FileOpen.aspx?Type=4&ID=6640 | mismatch | sha256 drift: archived f900e52973bd1b9cā¦ live bbb34c1b14ff3b0fā¦ (81,546 bytes) |
Method, honestly
The comparison is against what the city's servers return today ā if the city replaces a file after we archive it, that surfaces here as a hash mismatch, and we say so. The auditor is software too, so the code and raw results above exist for checking the checker. Found a link that lands somewhere wrong anyway? Every page has an error-report link in its footer ā corrections are public.