--

description: "Live example showing a malformed frontmatter delimiter detected by Zenzic."

Z506: MALFORMED_FRONTMATTER

Severity: error · Penalty: −5.0 pts (Content) · Suppressible: Yes

What Zenzic detects

The opening frontmatter delimiter on line 1 must be exactly ---. Any first line that starts with two or more dashes but is not exactly --- is silently ignored by most static-site engines. The consequence is that template:, title:, and all other metadata keys are rendered as raw prose instead of being parsed.

This file intentionally opens with -- (two dashes) to trigger the rule. The directory_policies configuration in .zenzic.toml keeps this Gallery page green.

Terminal Output

 Z506 MALFORMED_FRONTMATTER
 docs/tutorials/examples/z5xx-content/z506-malformed-frontmatter.md:1

  1 │ --
    │ ^^
    Malformed frontmatter delimiter on line 1: '--' is not a valid YAML
    frontmatter boundary. Use exactly '---' (three dashes) on its own line
    to open the frontmatter block; 'template:', 'title:', and all metadata
    directives will be ignored by most engines otherwise.

 Severity  error · Penalty  −5.0 pts (Content)

Common triggers

Line 1 content	Fires Z506?
--	✅ Yes — only two dashes
----	✅ Yes — four dashes
--- @generated	✅ Yes — trailing text
---	✗ No — valid delimiter
# Title	✗ No — no dashes at all
-	✗ No — single dash

Fix

Ensure the very first line of the file is exactly three dashes and nothing else:

```yaml

description: A well-formed frontmatter block

## Suppression

If you need to suppress Z506 on a specific file (e.g. a gallery page like this one):

```markdown
## -- <!-- zenzic:ignore: Z506 -->