Editorial policy

Who writes this

ToolZool’s guides are written by the people building the tools. There is no content team writing about software they have not used, and nothing on this site is generated and published without a human reading it first.

What we hold ourselves to

We distinguish measurement from guidance. Where we state a number as measured, we will have measured it and will say how. Where we are describing typical behaviour, we say “typically” and mean it. We have not yet published benchmark data, so nothing on this site currently claims to be one.

We do not invent evidence. No fabricated testimonials, no invented user counts, no traffic figures we cannot substantiate, no review scores. If a page has no numbers on it, that is because we do not have numbers we would defend.

We date everything. Every guide carries a publication date and a revision date, so you can judge how current it is. Technical advice about image formats and browser support goes stale, and a guide with no date gives you no way to tell.

We write for the reader, not the search engine. Guides exist because someone needs the answer. Where a topic does not warrant a page, we do not create one to fill a gap in a keyword list.

Corrections

If we get something wrong, we fix it and update the revision date. Where a correction is material — where someone might have acted on the wrong version — we note what changed at the foot of the page rather than editing silently.

You can report an error through the contact page. We would rather hear it from you than leave it standing.

Commercial influence

ToolZool carries no advertising today. When it does, these rules will apply and are stated here in advance so they can be held against us:

• Advertising will be visually distinct and labelled, never styled to resemble a tool control or a download button.
• No advertiser will influence editorial content. A guide’s recommendation will never be for sale.
• Sponsored content, if it ever appears, will be labelled as sponsored in a way that is obvious before you read it, not in small print underneath.
• Affiliate links, if we use them, will be disclosed on the page that carries them.

Comparisons with other products

We research other tools to understand what people expect, and we sometimes describe the common pattern across a category — for instance, that most online converters upload your file to a server. Where we do that, we describe the pattern rather than naming and criticising a specific competitor, and we say so on the page.

We do not copy other products’ code, wording, layouts or illustrations. Everything on ToolZool is our own work.