Editorial Policy

This page explains how the AlphaFonts blog researches, writes, and corrects its articles. It exists so a reader can check our work, not just trust it.

Where facts come from

For a rule about a specific platform, we start with that platform's own documentation: Etsy's Seller Handbook and Help Center for shop rules, Discord's and TikTok's own help articles for character limits and field behavior, and the Unicode Consortium's published character data for anything involving code points, character blocks, or combining marks. Third-party guides and community discussions (Reddit, forums) are useful for understanding what people are actually confused about, but we do not treat them as a factual source on their own.

Claims about how a Unicode character renders, which block it belongs to, or whether a style has an exception are checked against the actual character tables our own font generator uses, in lib/fonts/. If an article states a fact about this site's own tool, that fact is true of the tool as shipped, not a general claim about font generators.

What we don't do

We don't invent statistics, search volumes, or rankings. We don't claim testing we haven't done or experience we don't have. Where a platform doesn't publish a rule, or we can't verify one, the article says so instead of guessing. A few existing articles do this explicitly, for example noting that this tool cannot check Etsy shop-name availability, only format validity.

Corrections

Platform rules change. When we find that an article states something that's no longer accurate, or was wrong when written, we correct it in place rather than leaving the old claim standing. Our Etsy shop-name article, for one concrete example, previously stated that Etsy does not publish a limit on how many times you can rename a shop. Checking Etsy's Help Center directly showed that is wrong: Etsy allows up to five renames from Shop Settings before a change requires Etsy Support approval. That correction is live on the article now.

Authorship

Articles carry a byline and a publish date. Where an article has been substantively updated since it first went live, that should be reflected in the article itself rather than left silently stale.

For the product itself rather than the blog, see About AlphaFonts.