Symptom
"I definitely marked this as processed, and it's back in the list."
Cause
The collector's records carried 'status': 'new'. The collector cron runs every six hours with a merge-duplicates upsert, and it reset every status a human had changed back to the initial value. Already-published items were resurrected as candidates. One more day and a duplicate publish would have gone out.
Rules
r.pop('status', None))How to recognize it
"I marked it and it came back" → compare against the sync interval.