The operator's ruling (Background Jobs, 2026-10-08): a Steward page reads stored records; the sources are contacted by scheduled collection. An audit of every GET handler, HTMX fragment, widget poll and MCP read tool found one page load that reached out: Settings -> Plugins' catalog fragment fetched each plugin repository (5 min cache, 10 s timeout each, retried on every load when unreachable). plugin_catalog_refresh ticks every minute and fetches a repository whose copy is missing or older than an hour, waiting 5 min after a failure; saving repositories clears the cache, so the next tick fetches. The fragment only reads the cache and says which repositories are not fetched yet. Refresh is now a POST that fetches at once, as does install. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>