The guide
Editorial policy
The rules we hold ourselves to, written down so a reader can hold us to them as well.
This page describes how Presence & Protocol is produced. It is short on purpose: a policy nobody can check is decoration.
How a subject gets chosen
A page exists when a reader question exists and a primary document can answer it. If the only available material is other people's summaries, we do not write the page. That rule is why the site has five layers and not fifty topics.
How a claim is checked
Precise claims, meaning numbers, dates, names and protocol behaviour, are taken from the specification or from the publisher of the fact. Where the specification and common practice disagree, we say both and say which is which. We do not present a plausible reading of a protocol as if we had tested it, and we do not describe a piece of software we have not looked at.
Illustrations
The photographs on this site are illustrations. They are produced for the site and they do not document a real named place, person, product or event. An illustration never stands as evidence for a claim in the text; the text carries its own sources.
Money
Nothing on this site is paid for by anyone. There is no advertising, no sponsored page, no affiliate link and no paid placement in any list. If that ever changes, it will be labelled on the page it affects, in the page itself, before the reader reaches the content.
Corrections and withdrawals
An error is corrected on the page that carries it. A page that turns out to be wrong from top to bottom is rewritten or withdrawn, and a withdrawn address answers plainly instead of pretending to be something else. Reports go to the desk.