How we review

Reviewing other people’s work is the most useful thing this site can do and the easiest to do badly. This page is the method, published so that any claim here can be argued with on the facts.

No scores

There are no ratings out of ten. A single number compresses away the only thing that matters — what a tool is for — and invites an argument that cannot be settled. Every entry states what it is good for and what it is not good for.

Every negative claim is reproducible

If this site says something does not work, it names a version, a date, and steps that fail. Not an impression, not a summary of what someone said. If we cannot reproduce it, we do not publish it.

Facts are collected, not judged

Some fields are gathered mechanically rather than assessed: whether the source is public, the licence, the date of the last commit. These need no opinion and are refreshed automatically, so “actively maintained” is a date you can check rather than a verdict we reached.

Every entry is dated

Each carries the date it was reviewed and the version reviewed. A review with no date is a claim about a moving target, which is to say not a claim at all. Entries are re-verified on a schedule, and one that has gone stale says so.

Right of reply

Every entry links to a way to correct it. If a project has fixed something we described, that is a correction we want and will ship quickly, with a note of what changed and when.

Conflicts are disclosed

Projects the authors of this site work on are flagged as such wherever they appear. One undisclosed conflict would discredit every other entry in the directory, so this rule is absolute.