When we fall behind

TOVIO's feedback loop is run by one person in one weekly block. That is a real constraint, and pretending otherwise would be the first thing to go wrong. So there is a written ladder of what gets dropped first, in order, and each step is a deliberate, recorded decision rather than a silent lapse.

The order

1. The monthly product-update summary becomes less frequent.
2. The occasional question emailed to design partners is paused.
3. New help-center articles stop being written. The ones already here stay.
4. Triage happens less often than weekly, and the automatic acknowledgement on the design-partner ticket channel changes to say replies may take longer than usual.
5. If triage stops for an extended period, a pinned notice goes on every public board saying so. You should not have to infer it from silence.
6. If the backlog passes the point where an open channel is doing more harm than good, the channel is closed: every feedback link on every TOVIO surface stops rendering, and the pages say the channel is closed rather than pointing into a queue nobody is reading.

What is never on the ladder

• The moderation queue. It is the only control that keeps an accidentally posted vulnerability or a pasted repository file from becoming public, so it is cleared first, every week, regardless of what else is dropped.
• Shipped notifications. If something you asked for is released, you are told. That holds even when everything else on this list has been dropped.

Why publish this at all

Because the alternative is a queue that quietly stops moving while the portal still looks open. A published ladder makes the degradation visible and reversible: each rung is reversed the same way it was applied, and the acknowledgement text goes back to what it was.

None of this is a response-time commitment. TOVIO publishes no response times, and this article is not a back door to one — it describes what happens to the channel, not what happens to your post.