Liar's Ledger

Contributing

Liar’s Ledger is open source. Contributions are welcome, especially in these areas:

Politician dictionary

The dictionary covers the 110th through 119th Congress (3,606 entries). It needs updating when:

  • New members are sworn in mid-session
  • Members change their preferred names
  • Nicknames are missing (the LLM returns a name the dictionary doesn’t resolve)

To rebuild: node scripts/build-dictionary.cjs YOUR_CONGRESS_API_KEY

To add a nickname manually, edit src/lookup.js - find FULL_NAME_OVERRIDES (for full name substitutions) or NICKNAME_FIRST (for first-name substitutions).

News site compatibility

content.js uses a priority selector list to find article body text. Some sites use unusual markup. If the extension fails to extract article text on a site, the fix is usually adding a site-specific selector to the list in content.js.

Firefox support

The browser.* / chrome.* shim is already in place throughout the codebase. Firefox compatibility testing and AMO submission are planned but not yet done.

What we’re not looking for

  • Changes to the AI extraction prompt or Jaccard threshold without data supporting the change
  • New data sources without a corresponding proxy provider in server/providers/
  • Any change that puts API keys in the extension bundle
  • Changes to the Pro tier gating without updating the matching server-side middleware

Development setup

git clone https://github.com/ryanegauthier/liars-ledger.git
cd liars-ledger
cp src/config.example.js src/config.js

Load the extension in Chrome developer mode. Run the backend proxy locally for full functionality - see Backend Proxy - Local development.

Submitting changes

  1. Fork the repository
  2. Create a branch: git checkout -b fix/your-fix-name
  3. Make your changes
  4. Test with at least two different political news articles
  5. Open a pull request with a description of what changed and why

Reporting issues

Open a GitHub issue at github.com/ryanegauthier/liars-ledger/issues.

Include:

  • The URL of the article you were scanning (if applicable)
  • The error code shown in the popup (e.g. [ERR-CACHE], [ERR-NET]) if any
  • The debug log output (copy from the popup’s Debug Log panel)
  • Chrome version and OS