Every appointment ends, and nobody tells you

An appointment that has expired stops working on its own, at midnight,
with no email. This page explains why, and what to do about it.

The mistake

Somebody who has been approving things for two years suddenly cannot.
Nothing changed, nobody revoked anything, and the register still shows
their name.

Their term ended. The register shows the record; the authority went
with the date.

Why every appointment has an expiry

Because an appointment that never lapses is one nobody reviews.

The system this replaced had appointments with no end date. Two years
later the register listed people who had left, people whose role had
changed, and one person who had been appointed for a single project
that finished. Nobody had done anything wrong. Nobody had done anything
at all, which was the problem.

What LEAT does about it

- A warning appears on the register sixty days before a term ends.
- The term ends on its own date, whether or not anybody noticed.
- An hourly sweep marks the record expired and tells the other modules,
so a cached permission is dropped within seconds rather than at the
end of the day.

What to do

Re-appoint. It is a new appointment, proposed by somebody who may
appoint and approved by a third person, exactly like the first one.
There is no renew button, because a renewal nobody reviewed is the
thing the expiry exists to prevent.

Suspended, expired, revoked

Three different words for three different facts, and the register keeps
them apart:

1. Suspended. Paused, reversibly, with a reason. It can come back.
2. Expired. The term ran out. Nobody had to do anything.
3. Revoked. Ended early by somebody named, with a reason. It does not come back.