fix: stop syncing banner flashing purple over the nav bar

[brianorwhatever]

Problem

A purple bar flashed over the nav bar from time to time. It was the OfflineIndicator "Syncing…" banner. It shows as violet because src/index.css remaps the amber-* colors to violet.

offlineObserver starts a background sync every 5s. SyncManager.sync announced 'syncing' at the start of every run, even when it had nothing to send. That made the banner appear for a moment on each run.

Fix

• src/lib/sync.ts: announce 'syncing' only once an operation is actually about to be sent. Edits in conflict, out of retries, or still in backoff no longer trigger it.
• OfflineIndicator.tsx: also require pendingCount > 0 before showing the syncing banner.

Tests

• Added 4 cases to scripts/sync-auth.test.mjs. They cover idle polling, already-acknowledged work, and ineligible work (conflict, retries used up, backoff).
• node --test scripts/sync-auth.test.mjs: 13/13 pass. The 4 new cases fail when run against the old sync.ts.
• tsc -b passes.
• Not checked by eye in the running app.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[railway-app]

🚅 Deployed to the boop-pr-278 environment in Friends

Service	Status	Web	Updated
boop	✅ Success (View Logs)	Web	Oct 7, 2026 at 4:37 am UTC

[pullfrog]

✅ No new issues found.

Reviewed changes

I reviewed the fix that stops the "Syncing…" banner flashing every time the 5s offlineObserver background poll runs.

• syncing is announced only when there is real work — SyncManager.sync now calls notify({ status: 'syncing' }) once, and only after an operation has passed every eligibility filter (acked, conflict, retries used up, backoff, predecessor-blocked, and a null result from prepareOperationForSync). The call sits right before executeMutation. Idle polls now emit only synced. Polls that find only ineligible work emit only error.
• OfflineIndicator also checks pendingCount > 0 — this is an extra guard on the syncing banner. Its only effect is to hide the banner when nothing is pending.
• Regression tests — the new cases compare the exact status sequences with deepEqual, so they fail on the old code, which always emitted syncing first. The ineligible-work cases also check that mutation is never called. node --test scripts/sync-auth.test.mjs passes locally (13/13).

I also checked the other places that read the sync status. useOffline passes the status through for each account. SyncStatus.tsx uses syncing only to disable "Sync now". Neither depends on the old behaviour of announcing syncing at the start of every run.

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