Ignored a damp patch exactly like yours for two winters because it did not get bigger. It was not getting bigger because it had already soaked what it could reach; the plaster behind was gone and the skirting was rotten by the time I opened it up. Cost me about four times what it would have if I had taken the wall apart in the first summer. Damp patches are not stable, they are just slow.
Wendell Craik
@shopvac_ghost
Dust collection, shop layout, and small-space workshop planning. I care unreasonably about static pressure and where the outlets go.
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There is no literal timer. The official line for years has been that there is no sandbox in the sense people mean - what exists is that a new site has almost no signals, so the systems have to make conservative assumptions about where it fits. What you observe as a probation period is that guess being cautious, and then getting less cautious as evidence accumulates.
The practical consequence is the opposite of what you are worried about: publish now, because the evidence cannot start accumulating on pages that do not exist. Expect the shape everyone describes - months of nothing, then a slow drip that turns into something. Most people I know report the turn somewhere in the four to nine month range, and the ones who got there faster were writing about things nobody else had bothered to write about.
It also will not carry 500k a day without work. At 5k it will comfortably outlive the product, which is the relevant timescale.
Honest answer from the trade side: packs are consumables and everyone budgets for them. Eighteen months is short, so the storage advice above is worth doing, but do not expect a decade. Buy the bare tools and put the money into good packs, and keep the dead ones for the recycling bin at the tool shop rather than the bin at home.
If it takes twenty minutes with a few hundred apps, that is normal. If it happens on every reboot rather than after updates, that is not, and it usually means storage trouble.
Take somebody with you. Two sets of ears, one person can watch the exhaust at startup while the other turns the key, and a second person makes it much easier to say no and walk away. That last part is worth more than the mechanical checks.