{"author":null,"category":null,"content":"Every guide and review on this site carries a status. This page explains what those statuses mean in practice, so you can judge for yourself how much weight to give any page.\nUnverified by default A guide or review is unverified until a human reviewer has checked the subject against its live state — live rules, live moderation, live content — and dated that evidence. Until then:\nClassifications (SFW/mixed/explicit) are editorial guesses, labeled as such. Audience notes describe apparent purpose, not confirmed policy. No subscriber counts, activity levels, or other statistics are stated, because none have been collected with a date. You will see this rendered as Status: unverified and Last reviewed: UNVERIFIED on every affected page. That is not a placeholder waiting to be filled by automation; it is the actual current state.\nManual verification only Verification is a human step with a date attached. There is no automated pipeline that flips a community from unverified to verified. When verification happens, the page records who checked, what they saw, and when — and the self-promotion policy note is updated from verify to whatever the live rules actually say.\nNo fabricated claims The editorial rules are simple: if we have not observed it with a date, we do not state it as fact. Hedged language (\u0026ldquo;appears to be,\u0026rdquo; \u0026ldquo;seems to serve\u0026rdquo;) marks inference; anything stated flatly is either directly observable or sourced to a linked organization\u0026rsquo;s own site.\nNo promotion, ever Nothing on this site posts, messages, upvotes, or otherwise acts toward any community or platform it writes about. Every catalog entry\u0026rsquo;s self-promotion policy is pinned to verify — meaning no outreach until a human confirms the live rules permit it. For most entries, the practical answer is that no promotion should ever happen.\nThe public Resources section The Resources section is held to a stricter standard than the editorial side: it is public (no age confirmation), carries no advertising or tracking, links only to independent organizations\u0026rsquo; own sites, and makes no claims about any community at all. Its pages are reviewed on their own schedule and carry their own Last reviewed dates.\n","date":"2026-08-31","excerpt":"How this site researches community guides: unverified by default, manual verification only, no fabricated claims, no promotion.","heat":null,"intensity":null,"kink":[],"orientation":null,"readingTime":1,"tags":[],"title":"Methodology: How Guides Are Researched and Reviewed","url":"https://traps-arent.pages.dev/methodology/","wordCount":353}