Root cause: bootstrap.php rotates the CSRF token on every successful POST,
but most API endpoints called echo json_encode() directly instead of
apiRespond() — so the rotated token was never returned to the client.
The next POST from the same page sent the now-invalid old token → 403.
Refreshing the page loaded a fresh token, making it work once.
Fixes:
- assign_ticket.php, watch_ticket.php: switch to apiRespond()
- saved_filters.php, user_preferences.php: replace all echo json_encode
calls with apiRespond() (19 and 12 call sites respectively)
- base.js: both apiFetch() and _apiFetchAuth() now update window.CSRF_TOKEN
whenever a response includes a csrf_token field, keeping the client
permanently in sync with server-side rotations
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>