First visit, daily photo, and proverbs

What this covers

Two small things that live on the HQ Feed and that every network admin sees on day one: a four-slide welcome walkthrough that shows itself exactly once per person, and a briefing card at the top of the feed that carries a new photo and a short proverb every day. Neither is a compliance tool or a signal. They are the calm framing around the network intelligence underneath, and this article documents exactly what they show, when they show it, and how the timing is decided.

Where to find it

Both live on the HQ Feed, the landing page for HQ at hq.verinode.ai/feed, reachable from the top of the sidebar. The Feed became HQ's landing surface on 2026-05-23 (it used to be the Network page); the welcome walkthrough moved here at the same time.

The first-visit welcome walkthrough

What it is. A four-slide modal titled "Welcome to HQ" that opens automatically the first time a person signs in to a given network, and never opens automatically again for that person on that network. It orients a new HQ admin or invited teammate to what HQ is for before they start reading the feed.

When it opens. It waits 1.5 seconds after the page loads so the network health briefing card loads first, then fades in. It only opens at all if the server has determined this is the first visit: it checks the intro_seen_at column on your the network data row (the row that ties your account to this specific network membership) and shows the walkthrough only when that column is still empty. The moment you dismiss it, that column is stamped with the current time, and the walkthrough will not open again on a future visit, on this or any other device, because the check happens on the server before the page even renders.

The gate is per person, per network, not per network overall. If your network already has three admins who have all seen the walkthrough and a fourth teammate is invited, that fourth person still gets the full four-slide walkthrough the first time they sign in, even though everyone else on the network dismissed theirs months ago.

There is a second, lighter-weight suppression layered on top in the browser: once you dismiss the walkthrough, your browser also remembers it locally so that if you have two tabs open in the same sign-in, or you reload in the same session while the server write is still in flight, the walkthrough does not flash open a second time. This local memory is a convenience only. The server record on intro_seen_at is the one that actually decides whether you see the walkthrough on your next visit; the local memory does not carry across devices or browsers.

What each slide covers:

1. "Welcome to HQ, [your network's name]": states HQ's role in one line, the intelligence layer that sits on top of everything your franchisees already use, covering aggregated benchmarks, decision adoption, compliance posture, and program performance, all without operator business records crossing the line.
2. "Brand your network": points you to Settings → Identity & Branding, where uploading your logo and picking a primary color rebrands the sidebar, the feed hero, broadcast emails, and the Decision Day pack all at once.
3. "Lock down your account": points you to the Security tile to set an HQ Vault Key (encrypts sensitive profile fields with a key only your password unlocks) and to add an authenticator app for two-factor sign-in.
4. "You are a network steward": the privacy boundary, stated plainly. Operator data is owned by the operator; HQ sees aggregates and compliance posture, never individual jobs or claims. A two-column comparison spells out what HQ sees (anonymized aggregates, decision adoption rates, compliance posture, cohort benchmarks) against what HQ does not see (individual jobs, claims, customer records, supplements, contractor payroll), with a pointer to Settings → Privacy & Legal for the full commitment and to privacy@verinode.ai for questions.

Controls. A counter in the top-left reads "Welcome to HQ, 1 of 4" (etc.). Skip, top-right, closes the walkthrough immediately from any slide and still stamps intro_seen_at, so skipping counts as having seen it. Dots at the bottom show your position and are clickable to jump to any slide directly. Back appears once you are past slide one. The primary button reads Next on slides one through three and Get started on the last slide; either one advances, and clicking it on the last slide closes the modal. Left and right arrow keys move between slides while the modal has focus.

Never re-shown once dismissed for this membership. There is no re-trigger, no "show me again" control, and no admin setting to reset it for someone else. If a teammate wants a refresher on what HQ is for, point them at this article, or at Verinode HQ overview.

The first-run "Tune your feed" card

Separately from the walkthrough, if you are a first-time HQ user whose feed preferences have never been tuned, a "Tune your feed" card appears as the very first slide in your feed's card stack (before any network signals). It asks two quick questions, how much industry news and learning content you want riding alongside your network signals, and which content formats (articles, video, podcast, and so on) you actually want to see, then retires permanently once you tap Save or Not now. You can always revisit your focus areas later in settings.

This card and the welcome walkthrough are deliberately kept from stacking on top of each other: the tune card only renders if the walkthrough is not currently showing. In practice, on a genuinely first visit you will see the four-slide walkthrough first (after the 1.5-second delay), and the tune card sits waiting underneath as the first card in the feed once you dismiss it.

The daily briefing card

What it is. The very first card in your feed, every day, whenever the feed's All filter is active. It is not a network signal and it does not scroll away with the rest of the feed content, it is a full-height photo card with a greeting, a proverb, and the day's photo credit.

What you see, top to bottom:

• Greeting, personalized by time of day: "Good morning, [your first name]" before noon, "Good afternoon" from noon to 5pm, "Good evening" after that. If your name is not available it just reads "Good morning" / "Good afternoon" / "Good evening."
• Subtitle, network-flavored: "Here's your network & industry briefing" earlier in the day, or "Here's tonight's network briefing" in the evening.
• Briefing stats (only when there is something to report): short lines like "3 decisions need attention," "5 new articles," "2 videos to watch," "1 podcast to listen," or "4 upcoming events," one line per category, only for categories that actually have items in your current feed. If none of these categories have anything, this section is simply absent, no placeholder line.
• Recognition badges, top-right, for account rank and founder or trustee status, if you have earned any. These only render once the underlying status check resolves; if you have none of these, nothing shows there.
• The proverb, in quotes, italic, with its reference underneath in smaller type (for example, a line from Ecclesiastes or Proverbs with the chapter and verse). This can be turned off entirely for a given feed render; when it is on (the normal case), it rotates daily, explained below.
• Location label, bottom-left, naming where the day's photo is from (for example "Yellowstone, Wyoming" or "Chicago, Illinois").
• Photo credit, directly under the location, reading "Photo by [Photographer Name] on Unsplash" with both the photographer's name and "Unsplash" as clickable links back to the source, per Unsplash's attribution requirement. If the photo came from Verinode's static fallback pool rather than a live Unsplash lookup, the credit shows the photographer's name as plain text with no link.
• "Swipe up to begin," bottom-right, a plain instruction to scroll down into the rest of the feed.

Why HQ's photo and proverb are never the same as IQ's on the same day. Verinode IQ (the operator product) shows its own briefing card with the same layout on the operator feed. Both IQ and HQ pick their daily photo and proverb by rotating through a fixed list based on the day of the year, so that everyone on the same surface sees the same photo and proverb on a given day, which keeps it a genuine "daily" touch rather than something that changes on every refresh. Without any adjustment, HQ and IQ would land on the exact same photo and the exact same proverb every single day, since they both start counting from the same day-of-year. To avoid that, HQ's rotation is shifted by a fixed offset (23) before picking, on both the photo query and the proverb. The offset is deliberately not a round number and does not divide evenly into either list's length, so the two surfaces' picks stay spread apart across the year rather than periodically re-syncing. The practical effect: an operator using IQ and an admin using HQ at the same company, or two people who happen to check both products the same morning, will never see the same photo or the same line from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, or similar, on the same day.

Where the photo comes from. Verinode pulls a fresh, US-themed landscape or city-skyline photo from Unsplash's photo search once per calendar day, using a rotating list of specific queries, named national parks, city skylines, and regional landscapes across the country. The same photo is cached and reused for every HQ visit that day (it does not change on refresh), and the cache resets at the start of the next calendar day (UTC). If the Unsplash lookup fails for any reason, quota, network issue, or a missing API key, the card falls back to a fixed, pre-selected static photo pool built into the product, so the card never shows a broken image. That fallback photo shows without a clickable credit link, only the photographer's name as text.

Where the proverb comes from. A fixed list of short scripture lines themed around teamwork, diligence, encouragement, and generosity (drawn from books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Galatians, and Philippians), one per day, rotating by day of year the same way the photo does, offset by the same fixed amount described above. It is deterministic: everyone viewing HQ on the same calendar day sees the same proverb, and it does not change if you reload the page.

How to use it

Neither the walkthrough nor the briefing card requires action from you. The walkthrough is a one-time orientation, read it once, dismiss it, and move on into the feed. The daily card is ambient framing at the top of your feed, its function is to mark that a new day of network intelligence has started; the network signals, benchmarks, and compliance items you are actually here for are one swipe below it. There is no setting to turn the photo or proverb off from the operator side of HQ; showProverbs is a platform-level toggle Verinode controls, not a per-network preference.

Empty states

• Walkthrough: if the server cannot confirm your intro_seen_at status (a transient read failure), the walkthrough simply does not open. Nothing is shown in its place, the feed loads normally.
• Briefing stats line: any category (decisions, articles, videos, podcasts, events) with zero items that day is omitted outright, there is no "0 decisions" placeholder.
• Recognition badges: if you have no rank and are not a founder or trustee, no badge area renders at all, top-right sits empty.
• Photo: if the day's live Unsplash photo fails to load in your browser, the card silently swaps to the static fallback photo without any error message.
• Photo credit: shown only when a photographer name is available; on the static fallback path the credit still shows but without a link.

Related reading

• Verinode HQ overview
• Network health
• HQ compliance
• Broadcasting to your network