Partners adjacent becomes a hard rule

Partners adjacent is soft, so a plan that splits a couple publishes and the couple find out on the day. TT-14 registered it at the severity KB-2 gives it. That severity changes.

It is not only a label. Auto-allocate has to satisfy it now, and that is a different problem from the hard rules it satisfies already: capacity and conflicts ask which table somebody is at, and this asks which seat, next to whom.

The top table is exempt, and it has to be

KB-4 fixes the top table's order, says it is already printed and says it is not negotiable. Under that order the groom's parents sit at seats two and seven, and the bride's parents at three and six. Neither pair is adjacent. At a top table of six, where seats fill from the middle outward, neither pair is adjacent either.

All three shipped scenarios seat three couples at the top table, and two of those three are split by the protocol itself. Made hard without an exemption, every plan in every scenario is permanently unpublishable, and nothing can fix it, because the thing that would fix it is another hard rule.

A pair is exempt when either of them is at the top table. Not merely violations reported against the top table: KB-4 says nobody without a protocol role sits there, so a protocol role whose partner holds none is kept apart from them by the protocol, and that pair can never be adjacent either.

KB-2 now carries the rule at that severity and with that scope. This builds what it says.

Acceptance criteria

• Partners adjacent is registered hard, and a plan splitting a couple at a round table does not publish
• A pair with either partner at the top table raises nothing, at either severity
• Adjacency still wraps on a round table: the first and last seats are next to each other
• Auto-allocate seats partners together wherever a plan doing so exists, and names the pairs it could not
• The violations panel shows the rule as hard, with the shape hard violations already carry
• A plan already in local storage that splits a couple reads as unpublishable when it is loaded, rather than staying publishable because it was saved before the change

Notes

Auto-allocate is the work. The rest is a severity and a registration.

The score is unaffected in shape. Partners adjacent would have dropped out of it when the score counted soft rules only, but TT-46 has every rule contributing, so it moves from the soft half of the mean to the hard half and carries a heavier weight there. Plans will score differently; no dimension is lost.