Editorial policy

What we will and will not publish, how commission is kept out of editorial decisions, and what happens when we get something wrong.

Independence

Spool & Slice earns Amazon Associates commission on qualifying purchases made through our links. That is the site's only revenue and it creates an obvious incentive, so the rules that constrain it need to be specific rather than reassuring.

1. Commission rate plays no part in ranking. Not in which products appear, not in what order, not in what score they get. Where a product with a lower commission is the better answer, it goes first.
2. We accept no free products. No review units, no samples, no loans. Nothing arrives here from a manufacturer.
3. We accept no sponsored placements or paid rankings. There is no rate card. A brand cannot buy a position, a mention, or a link.
4. No brand sees a page before publication. No approvals, no review, no advance copies.
5. Where a cheaper channel exists, we say so. Our where to buy page tells readers to buy from a physical store when it is cheaper, which costs us commission and is the correct thing to publish.

What we refuse to publish

• Fabricated reviews or testimonials. This site has no customer reviews, star ratings or testimonials anywhere, because it has none to publish. There is no version of this rule with an exception in it.
• Claims of hands-on testing. We have not printed with this gear. Every page says so. See how we choose.
• Credentials nobody here holds. No engineering degree, no materials science background, no expert panel, no “reviewed by” a specialist who does not exist.
• Specification figures without a source. Every number links to the manufacturer document it came from, with a retrieval date.
• Prices we did not fetch. Live or absent, never remembered.
• Product identifiers we have not verified. A plausible-looking identifier that resolves to nothing is a fabrication and it also breaks the link.
• Comparisons the published data cannot support. Several pages here decline to publish a table for exactly this reason and say so in place of it.

Disclosure standards

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's endorsement guidance requires disclosures that are clear, conspicuous and hard to miss. We implement that as follows:

• A funding statement above the first buy link on every commercial page, not buried at the bottom.
• An #ad label and a disclosure link directly under every buy button, including the ones with no price attached.
• rel="sponsored nofollow" on every earning link, per Google's link-spam policy.
• A site-wide statement in the footer of every page.
• A full disclosure page setting out the whole arrangement.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. Manufacturers revise data sheets, specifications change between production runs, and we make mistakes. What matters is what happens next.

1. Corrections are read first. A message flagging an error goes to the top of the queue.
2. Figures are fixed at the source. Every citation resolves through one registry, so a corrected document updates every page that used it rather than one page someone remembered.
3. The last-reviewed date on the page changes. Every page carries one, and it moves when the page does.
4. We do not quietly delete. If a recommendation turns out to be wrong, the honest fix is to change it and say why, not to remove the page.

Report an error through the contact form or by email to info@spoolandslice.com.

Update cadence

Prices refresh on a schedule and gate themselves on freshness. Content is reviewed when a source document changes, when a reader reports an error, or when a product in a ledger stops being available. There is no fixed calendar, because reviewing a page that has not changed produces a new date and no new information.

Author

All content is written by Scooter M., described accurately on the about page as an enthusiast rather than as a credentialed expert. Where a page's conclusion rests on reasoning rather than a cited figure, the reasoning is on the page so you can disagree with it.

On generated content

Every figure on this site was taken from a named document that is linked next to it. Every conclusion is reasoning we show. If a claim here cannot be traced to a source or to an argument you can read and reject, treat it as an error and tell us — that is exactly the failure mode this policy exists to catch.