The Old Girl is a community 3D printer. It takes jobs from the internet, runs on Ko-fi donations, and prints whatever the community votes on next. That's the concept.

But shipping a community-facing system with payment processing, realtime database subscriptions, and public write access requires care. We didn't want to launch broken, or — worse — launch with fake live data that pretended to be real.

Stage One: Honest Preview

Stage One is live right now. The printer is operational. The page is real. But the queue, the voting, and the Ko-fi integration are locked in "preview mode" — a controlled state where every button that would trigger a real action shows an honest "coming soon" instead.

The seed data on the page (the three queue items, the suggestions, the filament fund total) is real preview data — not fabricated numbers designed to make the system look more active than it is. The filament fund shows $18 because that's what was in the Ko-fi account when Stage One launched. The queue items are real planned prints.

Why Bother with Preview Mode?

The alternative is to ship a half-built system where buttons do nothing, forms 404, and payments fail silently. We've seen that on too many indie projects. It destroys trust before it's built.

Preview mode means the code path for every write operation — job submissions, votes, payments — is fully implemented and gated at the server level. The only change between Stage One and Stage Two is flipping an environment variable from preview to live. The infrastructure is already there.

Stage Two: Going Live

Stage Two requires three things to be hardened before the switch flips:

• → Cloudflare Turnstile on all public write paths (spam protection without user friction)
• → Stripe queue-jump with idempotent fulfillment (payment intent ID deduplication, webhook replay protection)
• → Server-side vote deduplication (no more localStorage-only vote tracking)

When those are done, the queue opens. No announcement, no fanfare — just a page that works.

The Principle

We build things that work before we ship them. The Old Girl is not a demo. It's a real printer that will take real jobs from real people. It deserves to launch correctly.