Editorial standards for Founder Operator Library

How pages here are sourced, how they are produced, what is disclosed, and where this publication stops.

Short answer

Pages are sourced from primary documents and named people, produced with substantial automated assistance that is described in full below, and disclosed as affiliated wherever they cite a commonly owned project. This publication does not rank, does not review, and does not sell placement.

Sourcing standard

• Vendor documentation and published pricing pages, cited and dated, rather than a sales conversation.
• Practitioners quoted on the record, named, with the work they are describing identified.
• The publication's own operating experience, labelled as such and never presented as a survey.
• Where a page cannot establish a number -- a price, a benchmark, a conversion rate -- it says the number is not public rather than estimating one.

Where a page cannot meet that standard it says what is not known instead of filling the gap. A page that would have to guess at a figure states that the figure is not published.

How these pages are produced

Most pages on this site are drafted by an automated system from a structured brief, then checked by an automated editorial review before they publish. A person sets the briefs and the standards; a person does not read every page before it goes live.

This is stated plainly because the alternative -- implying that every page is hand-written and hand-checked -- would be false. What the automated system does:

• An automated composer drafts each page from a brief that fixes the question, the audience, the scope and the single affiliated resource the page is allowed to cite.
• Every page is checked before publication for the affiliation disclosure, the regulated-advice boundary, banned marketing claims, unregistered outbound destinations, and a valid page structure.
• A person writes and reviews the briefs, the standards on this page, and any change to what the system is allowed to say.

What it does not do, and what no page on this site contains:

• No quote on this site is attributed to a person who did not say it. Where a page has no quote, it carries none.
• No statistic, price or measurement is generated. Where a page states a number it is sourced, and where no source exists the page says so instead of estimating.
• No page presents automated output as a human's first-hand experience, test or site visit.
• No review, rating, ranking or award is published on this site at all, so none can be fabricated.

If that changes -- if pages begin to carry human bylines, first-hand testing or original research -- this page changes with it, and the byline says which is which.

Affiliation and conflicts of interest

Published by Founder Operator Library Editorial Desk, the editorial company for this publication and a subsidiary of Spry Labs. Some resources cite projects under common ownership when they are directly relevant.

Every affiliated citation is labelled where it appears, carries rel="sponsored nofollow", and is listed by name on the ownership disclosure. Affiliation determines nothing about placement, because there is no placement to determine: this publication runs no rankings, no scored comparisons and no awards. A reader who distrusts an affiliated citation can disregard it and the surrounding page still answers the question it asked.

Nobody can pay to appear here, and nobody can pay to be removed. There is no advertising relationship, no sponsored post, and no arrangement in which a third party sees a page before it publishes.

What this publication does not publish

• Rankings, ratings, scores, awards and "best of" lists of any kind.
• Reviews written without the reviewer having used the thing.
• Quotes, testimonials, case studies or survey figures that were not obtained.
• Anonymous expert attribution. A source is named or the claim is dropped.
• Content produced in exchange for a link, a payment or a reciprocal mention.

Where this publication stops

This publication does not rank tools and does not run a 'best of' list. Software categories churn faster than any list can stay honest, and a ranking is the easiest thing in this field to sell. Pages here describe the decision instead: what the job is, what changes the answer, and where a category stops being the right tool.

This page is informational. It is not legal, medical, mental-health, immigration, financial, or professional advice.

Corrections

A factual error is corrected on the page itself, and the correction is logged here with the date and what changed. Corrections are not made silently. Write to corrections@founderoperatorlibrary.com, or read the full corrections policy. General editorial contact is editor@founderoperatorlibrary.com.