How entries are researched

Where the facts come from

Everything the directory records about a product comes from the vendor's own published material: the pricing page, the feature pages, the documentation and, for open source projects, the repository. Each fact is stored with the page it came from and the date it was read, and those appear at the bottom of every entry.

Practitioner discussion is read for context and to decide what is worth checking, but it is never recorded as fact. If a forum thread says a product handles something badly, that is a prompt to go and test the claim against the vendor's documentation, not something to publish.

What verified means

An entry marked verified carries a recorded source for every field it publishes. Where a vendor does not publish something, the field is left empty rather than filled by inference, so an absent value means nobody stated it rather than nobody looked. An entry marked unverified is a first pass: the shape is right, but some values have not been confirmed. The state is shown on the entry itself rather than buried here, and an unverified entry says so at the top.

This has teeth. Anthias turned out to be dual licensed under GPLv2 and a commercial licence, which the GitHub API reports as no licence at all, so the file had to be read directly. Xibo has moved to a new domain. In both cases the plausible assumption was the wrong one.

Products change their pricing and their platform support without announcing it, so a verification date is part of the fact. A price checked eighteen months ago is not a current price and the date lets you judge that for yourself.

What is ours rather than the vendor's

Two things on an entry are our own work and are labelled as such. The summary is written here, never lifted from vendor marketing. And the sectors an entry is filed under are our classification of who the product suits, read off how it is built rather than quoted from anyone. A vendor rarely publishes that, and a directory that only repeated vendor claims would not be worth reading.

Everything else is a claim about the product, and carries the page it came from.

How listings are ordered

Alphabetically, by product name. There is no score, no ranking and no editor's pick, because a ranking implies a testing programme that this directory does not currently run. Where a page needs an order that is not alphabetical, such as the alternatives list on an entry, the basis is stated on the page.

Money

The directory currently earns nothing. No vendor pays to appear, no vendor pays for placement, and no link on the site is an affiliate link.

That may change. If affiliate links are added, they will be labelled where they appear. If paid placement is added, it will sit in a slot that is marked as paid and it will not alter the ordering of anything else. Either change will be described here before it goes live.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, the fastest fix is to point at the entry and the field. Vendors are welcome to do this about their own products, and a correction from a vendor is treated the same way as any other source: it gets checked against a published page before the entry changes.