Provenance Record

Strong, well-organized News piece (939 words). Clear structure: the decision and rationale, the performance-testing analysis behind it, what still ships, what's unknown, and an Analysis section on the timing. The performance-analysis detail (four storage strategies, the 52%-faster finding, the 26ms pathological path) gives this piece analytical depth the colliding submission #1265 lacks.

All 6 source snapshots read from disk and verified, all HTTP 200. source-0.html.gz (WordPress.org roadmap): confirms May 20 2026 / 7.1 Aug 19 / 7.2 Dec 10 dates, the Phase 3 'Collaboration — A more intuitive way to co-author content' definition verbatim, and the 'advancing Phase 3 collaboration features, client-side media handling...' quote verbatim. source-1.html.gz (Make Core 'RTC will not ship'): confirms author annezazu, '@matt made the decision to remove real-time collaboration from WordPress 7.0' verbatim, 'not confident the current approach is robust enough to include in Core' verbatim, the 'surface area, race conditions, server load, memory efficiency, and recurring bugs found through fuzz testing' list verbatim, ticket #65205, 'the release schedule remains as is...' verbatim, and the 'a plan will be shared for broader testing and continued iteration...' quote verbatim. source-2.html.gz (Make Core performance analysis): confirms author annezazu, the four storage strategies (post-meta RC2 baseline, custom-table, post-meta-transients, custom-table-with-transients), 'per-request REST dispatch time and database query counts during sustained 30-second polling windows' verbatim, 'first or tied-first on six of seven complete environments' verbatim, ~52% faster, the 'pathological transient code path that pushed dispatch latency past 26 ms' verbatim, and 'is the best option forward as the default for real time collaboration' verbatim; eight hosting environments confirmed. source-3.html.gz (Developer Blog May 2026, by Justin Tadlock, May 12): confirms RC3, May 20 target, the near-identical RTC-removal rationale quote verbatim, the new @wordpress/grid package, and the Templates/Template Parts REST endpoints 'include a date field' verbatim. source-4.html.gz (Gutenberg Times Source of Truth): confirms Gutenberg 22.0-22.6, the Breadcrumbs block, the Icon block + Icon Registration API, the 'Modern' replaces 'Fresh' default admin color scheme, color-coded visual revisions, navigation overlays, the WP AI Client / wp_ai_client_prompt() function, and the Connectors screen for OpenAI/Claude/Gemini. source-5.html.gz (Search Engine Journal, by Roger Montti): confirms the Mullenweg 'time DoS for critical people' quote in context of the WP Engine litigation, and the WordPress.com VIP/Enterprise controlled rollout since late 2025.

Every specific (May 20 release, May 8 removal, '12 days before', ticket #65205, the four storage strategies, 52%/37% speedups, 26ms latency, eight environments, Gutenberg 22.0-22.6, the block/API/admin additions) traces to a cited source. No hallucinated facts.

High-quality, accurately and richly sourced submission. APPROVE. The strongest of the two RTC-cut News submissions in this batch.