Comment out README badges by default

A broken badge is a fine nudge in an organizer's own fork, but it also
made both the template's own README and every freshly forked one look
broken before anyone had a chance to configure anything — including
when just browsing the template repo to decide whether to fork it.
Ship them as an HTML comment instead, with a new setup step (9) telling
organizers where to uncomment and edit them.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016oBwXtyuMrATqZcKPgn8hc

Author: hhkaos

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -20,6 +20,15 @@ this file versions the template repo (dashboard, workflows, docs), the spec
 versions the data format. A template release never implies a schema bump, or
 the other way around.
 
+## [0.4.1] - 2026-08-07
+
+### Fixed
+- The three README badges added in 0.4.0 now ship commented out instead of
+  rendering broken by default: a broken badge is a fine nudge in your own
+  fork, but it also made both the template's own README and every freshly
+  forked one look broken before anyone had a chance to configure anything.
+  Setup step 9 tells you where to uncomment and edit them.
+
 ## [0.4.0] - 2026-08-07
 
 ### Added

README.md

@@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
 # OTE Template
 
+<!--
+Uncomment these once you've finished the setup below, replacing
+your-user/your-repo with your fork (and the Pages URL in the third one):
+
 [![Validate](https://github.com/your-user/your-repo/actions/workflows/validate.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/your-user/your-repo/actions/workflows/validate.yml)
 [![Publish](https://github.com/your-user/your-repo/actions/workflows/publish.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/your-user/your-repo/actions/workflows/publish.yml)
 [![OTE spec](https://img.shields.io/badge/dynamic/json?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyour-user.github.io%2Fyour-repo%2Ffeed.json&query=%24.specVersion&label=OTE%20spec&color=blue)](https://opentechevents.org/spec/)
-
-Replace `your-user/your-repo` in the three badge URLs above with your fork
-(and the Pages URL in the third one) once you've finished the setup below —
-until then they point at nothing and render broken, which is your reminder
-to come back and fix them.
+-->
 
 Fork this repository and get, with nothing but GitHub and GitHub Pages:
 
@@ -141,6 +141,11 @@ Add your community to the adopters list in
 [opentechevents-spec](https://github.com/OpenTechEvents/opentechevents-spec) so
 directories and users can find your feed.
 
+### 9. Turn on the README badges (optional)
+
+Near the top of this file, uncomment the `Validate`/`Publish`/`OTE spec`
+badges and replace `your-user/your-repo` with your fork.
+
 ## Editing events
 
 Phase 1 is hand-edited JSON — the workflows validate every push and pull

VERSION

@@ -1 +1 @@
-0.4.0
+0.4.1