Why some calculation methods disappear

You’re editing a Program or a Distributor. You remember picking Upline Cascade for it last week. Today the calculation-strategy dropdown only shows Fixed. Upline Cascade and Downline Cascade are gone. This isn’t a bug. Siren hid them on purpose, because the collaborator group currently bound to this Program or Distributor can’t support a cascade.

What’s happening

Every calculation strategy declares the capabilities it needs from the group it’ll walk. Today there’s one such capability: hasLayer. A calc that requires hasLayer is saying “I need to know which layer of the group I’m at while I walk it.” Upline Cascade and Downline Cascade both require it. Fixed doesn’t require anything. It just hands out a flat amount and doesn’t care about structure.

On the other side, every collaborator group structure declares what it provides. A flat group provides nothing. There’s no hierarchy to walk, so layer numbers don’t mean anything. A linear chain provides hasLayer, because position in the chain maps cleanly to layer distance. A parent-child group also provides hasLayer, because depth in the tree maps to layer distance from the trigger.

The picker compares the two sides. A calc shows up in the dropdown only when everything it requires is in the set of things the bound group provides.

In practice that comparison produces three states. With a flat group bound, only Fixed appears, because a flat group provides nothing for the cascades to require. Once you bind a linear chain or a parent-child group, both of which provide hasLayer, Fixed, Upline Cascade, and Downline Cascade all appear together. Before you’ve bound any group at all, every calc appears, since Siren doesn’t pre-filter your options until you’ve made a structural choice.

That last case is intentional. If the dropdown hid options before you’d even bound a group, you’d have to guess which calc you want by inferring which group to pick, which is the wrong order.

Check whether yours is currently paying no one

Hiding the option in the dropdown does not change a calculation you already saved. So if you picked Upline Cascade or Downline Cascade earlier and the group bound to this Program or Distributor is now flat, your saved cascade is still in place and it pays no one. It does not quietly fall back to Fixed. It pays out zero on every trigger, and your collaborators earn nothing until you fix it.

You are likely in this state if the dropdown shows only Fixed, you remember choosing a cascade, and recent activity for this Program or Distributor shows no credits. The flat-group case is silent: Siren writes no error or log for it, so the missing credits are the only signal. Re-binding a group with the right structure, below, starts crediting again. For every state that makes a cascade pay no one, and how to confirm which one you are in, see cascade troubleshooting.

How to make a cascade calc appear

If you want Upline Cascade or Downline Cascade in the dropdown, bind a collaborator group whose structure is linearChain or parentChild. The picker re-renders the moment you switch the bound group, and the cascade options appear. Pick the one you want, configure the per-layer points, save.

If you later swap that group back to a flat one, the cascade options disappear from the dropdown. The dropdown filter is a frontend convenience, though. It does not rewrite a calc you already saved. Siren does not coerce a saved cascade back to Fixed, and the API will persist a cascade calc against a flat-bound Program or Distributor if a client sends one directly.

What protects you is what happens when the calculation runs, not the dropdown. A cascade bound to a group that can’t provide layers pays no one when it runs. It credits zero collaborators on every trigger and does not fall back to a single Fixed payout. A Distributor bound to a flat group with Upline Cascade selected pays out nothing every time. A plain flat group does this silently, with no error or log, because there is nothing for the cascade to walk. A group whose structure yields steps that can’t report a layer (a misconfigured custom structure) pays no one the same way, and in that case Siren does log the misconfiguration so the silent no-op is traceable. For the full list of states that make a cascade pay no one, and how to diagnose them, see cascade troubleshooting.

If you want a cascade and the group you’ve bound is flat, the fix is the group, not the calc. Either change the existing group’s structure (if it doesn’t already have members whose ordering would be lost) or bind a different group that already has the right shape. The structure overview walks through which structure fits which scenario, and the calc strategy overview covers when a cascade is the right call at all.

For developers: capabilities are string ids declared by walker steps and required by calc strategies. The full list of marker interfaces, how to add a new capability, and how custom structure resolvers advertise what they provide is on the walker capabilities reference.