Publishing rules and boundaries
Summary
The document with the strictest instructions in the pack, because this site publishes other companies' words and handles individuals' financial lives. It sets the register's constitution as build requirements rather than editorial guidance: record, never verdict, no adjectives anywhere, checked by a CI blocklist; verbatim replies with requester details redacted as a pipeline step; silence recorded as a row; "we do not hold that" recorded neutrally; never publish a first refusal; a published policy page counted as an answer; and a solicitor reviewing the publishing rule and the first entry before it goes live — the one external dependency in the launch list. It draws the hard personal-data lines: the unit of the register is a company's behaviour, never a person's case, and no register entry is traceable to a requester. It states the do-not-publish list explicitly: any client's personal or financial data, any characterisation of a named company, the card-issuer lever as an offered service, and any legal page without its as-at date and status.
Key concepts
- The pre-release gate's verdict-word check
- The register's governance page
- What this site will not publish
- The as-at date discipline
Key ideas
- "A CI check should grep register pages for a published adjective blocklist; cheap, and it makes the rule structural."
- An undated legal page is treated as a leak, not a draft.
- Company replies quoted in entries are quotation for reporting: verbatim, attributed, dated.
- The tensions are published rather than resolved, including that the best year is the least defensible pitch.
On this site
Enforced structurally: the pre-release gate greps every register entry for a blocklisted verdict word before a release can tag, and the do-not-publish list is restated on the shipped page.