Editorial policy

How products are chosen

Products are selected because they solve a specific problem well, not because they pay well. Commission rates are not consulted when deciding what to include or what order to put things in. We have deliberately built the site so that this is easy to keep to: the affiliate links live in a separate data layer from the writing, and the person writing a page does not see a payout figure while writing it.

Every product recommendation must state:

• The exact problem it addresses
• Why it made the list, in terms of real criteria
• At least one genuine limitation
• Who should not buy it
• At least one viable alternative, with a reason someone might prefer it

These are not stylistic preferences. A page missing any of them fails the build check and cannot be published.

What we will not do

• Claim to have tested something we have not. See how we test.
• Sell placement. No paid rankings, no sponsored positions in a list, no "featured" slots bought by a brand.
• Let a manufacturer approve copy. If a brand supplies a product, we say so on the page, and they see it when you do.
• Publish prices in the text. They go stale and mislead. We link you to the merchant for the live figure.
• Reprint manufacturer marketing. Specifications are facts and get cited as such; claims are claims and get labelled as such.
• Use urgency or hype language. No "must-have", no "game-changer", no countdowns. The build check rejects these too.
• Bump dates to fake freshness. An updated date changes only when the content substantively changes.

Gifted and loaned products

If a product was supplied free or on loan, that is stated plainly on the page. A supplied product is never guaranteed a positive verdict, and accepting one carries no agreement about what we will write. Where we can, we buy things normally instead.

Accuracy and corrections

We make mistakes. When we find one — or you do — the page is corrected and the correction is noted rather than quietly patched. Material corrections update the page's updated date; typographical fixes do not.

Report a problem with a page. Reports that a product has been discontinued or has materially changed are particularly useful, because a recommendation pointing at something that no longer exists is worse than no recommendation.

Reusing the diagrams

The diagrams on this site are drawn here, for one question each, because some things are genuinely easier to see than to read. You may reuse any of them, including commercially, provided you credit Ugly Fixes and link to the page you took it from.No need to ask first.

You may crop one, resize it, or translate its labels. What you may not do is change what it claims — redrawing the arrows so a diagram asserts something the original does not, and leaving our name on it, is the one use that is refused.

Attribution can be as plain as: Diagram: Ugly Fixes, with a link. If you are writing about something we have drawn badly, tell us — a diagram that misleads is a correction like any other, and it will appear on corrections.

This covers the diagrams, not the prose, and not product names or logos belonging to their manufacturers.

Review cadence

High-intent guides are re-checked at least every 90 days. Seasonal guides are re-checked six to eight weeks before their season. Any review is revisited when the product is replaced, discontinued or materially changed.

Use of AI

Software is used in producing this site, including for drafting and for the checks described above. It is not used to invent experience. No page describes hands-on use that did not happen, no measurement is generated rather than measured, and no photograph presented as ours is synthetic. A human is responsible for every published verdict.