How the guides are put together

Each guide is composed from a fact bank: a title, the mechanism it explains, a worked example with real numbers, and the trap the thing is usually got wrong by. Those four are specific to that entry and are not reused in another.

The rest of the corpus is composed along axes — a league, a market, a situation — from banks that carry their own substance. That produces pages faster than writing each one from nothing, and it is also the shape that fails worst if nothing checks it, which is what the next two sections are for.

Two pages answering one question are worse than either page alone. They split whatever authority the question has earned, and the reader who lands on the weaker one gets the weaker answer.

So a candidate that answers a question the corpus already answers is not published at all. That is decided per pair rather than by a rule, because the two cases are not alike: sometimes the new page is the thinner one and never ships, and sometimes it is better and the old page retires into it.

This was found the hard way. Fifty beginner guides were written and nineteen of them answered a question already answered somewhere else, in completely different words — so every one of them passed the text check below while putting a second, third and in one case fourth page on the site for the same term.

Every candidate is compared against every page already accepted, by six-word sequences: the proportion of one page's sequences that appear in the other. Above 45%, the page is dropped rather than published. The count that survives is the count that ships.

It is a full pairwise scan across the whole corpus, not a check inside each batch. The per-batch version missed a third page about the same term, because it only ever looked at one bank at a time.

The reason this exists at all: a generator that fills a template from a list produces pages that differ in their nouns and agree in everything else, and the failure is invisible to whoever wrote the generator, because every individual page looks fine on its own.

Where a guide quotes a figure that somebody else publishes, it names the source and the date the source was read. The licensing pages, for instance, count every figure from a dated download of the public register they describe, and that date is printed on the page rather than implied by its freshness.

"Recently", "currently" and "as of today" are not dates. A page that uses them cannot be checked a year later, and cannot be found wrong either, which is the same problem wearing a friendlier word.

When a page is superseded, it is redirected to the page that answers the question better. Twenty-seven pages have been retired that way. The old address keeps working, for the reader who bookmarked it and for the link somebody else made to it.

Nothing is quietly removed. A page that is wrong is corrected or retired into the one that is right; an address that has been published is not taken back.

Some of the corpus exists in Spanish and some of it does not. A section with no Spanish text stays in English rather than being filled in automatically, and the site says which is which rather than presenting the two as one library.

The alternative was worse in a specific way: prose a Spanish reader can parse and would never have written, presented as though it had been written for them.

No bookmaker is recommended. Not one, not ever, and there is no affiliate link in any guide on this site. One of the guides is about how to tell when you are reading a page that is paid by the place it sends you to.

No win rate, no ROI, no yield. Not in the guides, not on the picks pages, not anywhere — the same rule the rest of the site is built on, for the same reason: a percentage drawn from a small sample says far more than it knows.

No promise about your money. A guide explains how something works and where it usually goes wrong. How much to stake is not on offer here.

Send it to [email protected], or through the help centre. The answer time is three business days, the same as everything else.

A factual error gets the page corrected or retired, with the redirect described above. That is the whole procedure, and it is short on purpose: a corrections policy nobody can carry out is a paragraph, not a policy.