When the delivery scheduler fires for a (carer, cared-for) pair, it picks the joke's text input via this priority chain. The chain stops at the first hit; later tiers serve as fallback when earlier tiers have no eligible signal.

1. 🎂 Saints name-match (highest) — If today's Catholic/Orthodox saint name matches the cared-for's first name (case + accent insensitive), the daily proverb_saint seed for their country wins outright. ~1-in-365 hit rate per name but the most personal signal we have. Generated daily by lolv1-saint-seeds-daily cron from saints_calendar.py. Falls through if no proverb seed exists for that country (admin should run cmd=generate_saint_seeds).
2. ♈ Zodiac match — If the cared-for's birthdate is on file (→ cared_for_zodiac), today's horoscope seed for their sign wins outright — a hard short-circuit, same strength as the name-match (it returns that seed directly, not a soft weight in the pool). Always on for the 12-sign rotation; only the personal name-day signal outranks it.
3. 📨 Joke ideas from subscribers (step 2.5) — Images forwarded to funny@myjokes.ai are VLM-scored and written to the topical-seeds table as source=user_submitted (active subs) / user_submitted_prospect, filed under the language detected in the image (else the sender's subscription country, else USA). Once the operator approves one on view=topical_seeds (consensus_verdict=pass), it short-circuits ahead of the generic topical pool: the scheduler picks the approved subscriber joke whose language matches the cared-for's language and whose country matches the cared-for's subscription country — highest consensus_funny_mean wins, ties broken by most-recent. Only fires below the personal name-day / zodiac signals; auto-rejected / pending submissions are never eligible.
4. 📰 Topical seeds (today + yesterday) — Weighted-random pick from passing seeds for the cared-for's country, scoped to today + yesterday in UTC. Weights:
   • status=preferred|live → 2.0× base (admin "Boosted")
   • status=candidate|empty → 1.0× base
   • status=blocked|human_rejected → 0 (excluded)
   • Each weight × consensus_funny_mean (clamped ≥ 0.5)
   Country fallback: if zero eligible seeds for the resolved country, falls through to the default country so a French cared-for never silently no-ops.
5. 📚 Joke database — When tiers 1-4 yield nothing (e.g. all seeds rejected for the country), the scheduler falls back to a random pick from the crowdsourced jokedb pool (pk=jokedb#… rows populated weekly by lolv1-jokedb-crawler-weekly, ~1235 jokes across 13 countries). Hard-filtered by the cared-for's language, preferring a same-country joke then any country in that language; no language match → falls through to tier 6. Reusable pool (not single-use). Delivered as source=from_scheduler_jokedb.
6. 🎭 humor_category template (fallback) — Final fallback: ChatGPT generates joke text from the cared-for's saved humor_category (dad_jokes, puns, one_liners, knock_knock, observational, sarcasm, …). No external input; pure prompt-driven. This is the path V1 always uses; V2/V3 only land here when every earlier tier misses.

drive_jokes flag: tiers 1-5 are gated on feature_flag:topical_seeds_drive_jokes. When OFF, the scheduler bypasses tiers 1-5 and always uses tier 6 (humor_category template). Toggle from view=topical_seeds.

Daily auto-delivery: lolv1-joke-delivery-every-5-min cron evaluates every active enrollment's delivery window (joke_period) and fires lolv1_crack_a_joke_x86 with the chosen seed payload (source=from_scheduler_topical_seed, _topical_seed_id). The topical seed is marked served (served_count/last_served_at) and excluded from the pool tiers (subscriber-idea + weighted topical) on every later tick so it isn't re-delivered. The personal name-day / zodiac signals prefer an unserved seed but will reuse a served one rather than skip the personalization. jokedb (tier 5) is a reusable pool and isn't served-tracked.