Why changing a market clears the worklist

A project in Rankgap names one market — a country and a language — and every analysis it runs asks about that pair. Move the project to another market and its opportunity worklist is cleared. That surprises people, so here is the argument for it.

The rows are answers to a different question

A finished run records the market it was asked in, so everything a run measured stays honest by itself: you can open last month’s run and see which country its numbers came from. The worklist does not work that way. It is keyed by the project, the kind of opportunity and the keyword — so one keyword can hold both a gap row and an outranked row — and a new run never deletes a row, which is exactly what lets you work through it over weeks, marking rows done or not worth it, and have the numbers refresh underneath your own marks.

That same property is what makes a market change destructive. Keep the old country’s rows and you have a list that is half one market and half another, with nothing on the row to say which, and no run to blame it on. A stale answer is recoverable. A list of two different questions mixed together is not.

The screen says what will go before you press it

The project’s settings screen states how many rows the change will clear, counting open, done and dismissed alike, because the dismissed ones are the work you will miss. With no worklist to clear it says so instead, and it adds that runs already recorded keep their own market.

And it waits for a run that is still going

A market change is refused while that project has a run in flight, and the refusal lives inside the statement that does the writing rather than in a check before it. The reason is specific: generating the worklist does not look at the market. A run that started in the old country and finishes after the clear would refill the emptied list with the old country’s rows, under a project that is now somewhere else. So the screen asks you to let the run finish first.

Afterwards, rebuilding the worklist reads only a completed run in the project’s current market. With none, it writes nothing and tells you to run an analysis in the new market first — which is a slower answer than refilling the list with whatever was lying around, and the only one that means anything.