The page we never linked to

This site has a toplist: the busiest public counters, plus per-country and per-language sub-lists. It is built, it is translated into eleven languages, it has an opt-out, and it has been live for a while.

It was linked from exactly two places: from inside the toplist itself, and from sitemap.xml. Not from the navigation bar, not from the footer, not from the front page. If you did not already know the address, there was no way to arrive at it.

This is the same shape as the six finished features nobody could reach, and it went unnoticed for the same reason: from the inside, a page you can open is a page that exists.

Adding one link, and what it uncovered

The navigation bar is built once and drawn twice — as a row on wide screens, and inside the burger menu below the breakpoint. Adding a fifth destination is one line. Before adding it, we measured how wide the row actually gets.

The browser tooling available here does not compute layout — it returns 0 for every width, for every element. So the labels were measured with GD against a real font file at the row's actual size, in every language. System fonts are narrower than the one used for measuring, so the numbers come out slightly too large, which is the right direction for an upper bound.

language	four destinations	five
French	982 px	1,123 px
Spanish	946 px	1,130 px
Chinese	730 px	802 px

The burger menu took over at 640 px. So the row already needed up to 982 px with four destinations, and between 640 px and 980 px it had been overflowing all along — the list has neither wrapping nor an overflow guard, and the tools on the right push back against it with margin-left: auto.

Adding a fifth item would only have widened that band. The switch point moved to 1,140 px instead.

The fix that was not chosen

The obvious alternative is to let the row wrap onto a second line. It was rejected for a specific reason: the live bar on statistics pages sticks to the viewport at top: 57px, and that number is the height of the navigation bar. A two-line bar would slide underneath itself on every statistics page. Moving the switch point leaves the height exactly as it was.

The label for the new link reuses the toplist page's own heading, which already exists in all eleven languages. No twelfth translation key, and the destination is named in the bar exactly as it is named on the page you land on.