The promo bot button carries a configurable variant-seed start-param (default verudit_ru-scrabble_en). The gateway parses start_param from the validated initData and forwards it; the backend, on first contact only, seeds the new account variant_preferences from it (English Scrabble alongside the default Erudit).
No schema change (the scrabble_en CHECK is already in the baseline) and the gateway<->backend REST field is additive, so the rolling deploy is safe in either order. TELEGRAM_PROMO_START_PARAM configures the payload (empty forwards the user own /start payload). Covered by account unit tests, a gateway transcode test, and an integration test asserting new-only seeding.
Ilia Denisov