[quality] .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/ is untested; the blog-post author dropdown silently drifts from blog/authors.yml

Start with tests/issue-template-contract.test.mjs and the committed files under .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/, then inspect blog/authors.yml and .github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md. Use the existing yaml dependency and run node --test --experimental-test-coverage; done means all listed issue-form, author-reference, and non-empty PR-template assertions pass without production or dependency changes.

Finding

No test in this repository reads .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/ or .github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md. grep -rn "ISSUE_TEMPLATE" tests/ scripts/ returns nothing, and the unit coverage report (node --test --experimental-test-coverage at 00b44df, 55 tests passing) lists only scripts/*.mjs and scripts/lib/*.mjs — no .github path appears at all.

Two failure modes are live today and neither has a guard:

1. The blog-post author dropdown drifts from blog/authors.yml.
blog/authors.yml declares 7 author keys:

castrojo  caniszczyk  idvoretskyi  jeefy  krook  mrbobbytables  nate-double-u

.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/blog-post.yml offers 6 — nate-double-u is missing. That is being hand-fixed in #243, which is the point: nothing detects the drift, so it is found by a human noticing, once per occurrence.

The more damaging direction is the inverse. A dropdown option that does not resolve in blog/authors.yml sends a contributor away with an author key Docusaurus cannot resolve, which is a fatal npm run build error. Today that direction happens to be clean; nothing keeps it clean.

2. A malformed issue form is only reported to the contributor trying to use it.
GitHub rejects an issue form for an unknown body type, a missing id on a non-markdown element, a duplicate id, an empty label, an empty labels entry, or a dropdown with no options. None of these are caught by npm run check (prettier, markdownlint, cspell, markdown-link-check never parse issue-form structure) or by npm run test:unit. The form breaks silently for everyone except the person trying to file.

Recommendation

Add tests/issue-template-contract.test.mjs asserting, against the committed files:

• every issue form under .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/ parses as YAML and declares a non-empty name, description and body
• labels, when present, is a list of non-empty strings
• every body element uses a type GitHub supports (markdown, input, textarea, dropdown, checkboxes)
• every non-markdown element has a unique id and a non-empty attributes.label; every markdown element has attributes.value
• every dropdown has a non-empty list of unique attributes.options
• blog-post.yml exists and still collects title, content and author
• every author dropdown option resolves in blog/authors.yml
• .github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md is present and non-empty

Parsing uses the yaml ^2.9.0 devDependency the repo already declares. No production code, no CI change, no package.json or lockfile change.

Deliberately out of scope

The reverse parity assertion — every blog/authors.yml key must appear in the dropdown — is not included, because it is red on main right now (nate-double-u) and #243 is the fix. Adding it here would duplicate that PR and land a failing test. It is worth adding as a one-line follow-up once #243 merges.

The field contract of blog/authors.yml entries themselves (name, title, url, image_url, https URLs) is asserted by #270 and is not re-asserted here; this issue claims .github/ only.

Priority

• Impact: medium — a broken issue form blocks contribution silently; an unresolvable author key is a fatal build error
• Effort: low — one new test file, no dependencies added

Filed by quality agent (hold-gated mode).

🐝 Hive Agent: quality | Instance: hosted-available-lke648397-260827-5n31 | SHA: 00b44df

— hive: agent=quality backend=copilot model=claude-opus-5