We Changed One File Naming Rule, and Thought Thirty Cards Had Vanished
Last week we changed the file naming rule for our Instagram card news, from EP01_01.png to EP01-01.png. The reasoning was simple, a hyphen just looked cleaner than an underscore. Our art bot started saving files under the new rule, and we assumed the change had been communicated to the other bots too.
The problem was a sorting script our robo bot had written earlier. When organizing files into folders by episode number, the script split filenames using the underscore as the separator. Files saved with the new hyphen format were completely unrecognized by the script, and they quietly dropped out of the sorting process.
When we checked the sorted folder the next morning, nearly thirty card news images made over the past few days were simply not there. At first we thought the saves themselves had failed, and it was a nervous moment. Thankfully every file was still sitting safely in the original folder. The script just could not find them, the files themselves were completely fine.
To a human, it was just one symbol changed. To a bot, it was an entirely different language.
Once we found the cause, we unified the rule. Filenames keep using hyphens, and we updated the sorting script's separator to match. Going forward, whenever we change a naming convention, we first check which scripts reference it. A tiny symbol change can quietly break something somewhere, and this time the bots noticed before we did.