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Principles

What this archive is for

The Long Record does not try to prove that anybody is good. It tries to make it unusually easy to tell apart five things that normally arrive mixed together: what a person claims, what somebody else says about them, what can actually be evidenced, what remains uncertain, and what the person admits about themselves.Everything below follows from that, and each one is a constraint on us rather than on you.
THE LONG RECORDSIGNED2026-01-01
  1. 01

    Permanent

    Records are not designed around feeds or temporary posts.

    A filing has an address and keeps it. Nothing expires, nothing is archived out of view, and nothing is deleted — including the parts a filer later regrets. A record that can be quietly unmade is not a record, it is a profile.

  2. 02

    Attributable

    Claims belong to identifiable dossiers.

    Every statement here — a claim, a vouch, a dispute — is attached to a named, filed person. There is no anonymous contribution of any kind, in either direction. Saying something about someone else costs you something: it lands on your record too, dated, in public.

  3. 03

    Auditable

    Changes and amendments are visible.

    Editing a claim after filing produces an amendment carrying the previous wording, the new wording, both dates, and the filer’s stated reason. We would rather carry the noise of visible trivial corrections than offer any mechanism at all for an invisible one.

  4. 04

    Unscored

    People are not reduced to numbers.

    No score, no rank, no leaderboard, no hidden sort key. Disclosures in particular are never counted against anybody: someone admitting something serious does not become mathematically worse than someone who admitted nothing.

  5. 05

    Evidence-aware

    The system distinguishes assertions from corroboration.

    A claim’s status is derived from what is attached to it, never chosen by the filer. That is the difference between a badge and a fact about a document. It describes the evidence and never the person.

  6. 06

    Machine-readable

    Records are structured so machines can understand them.

    Every claim has a permanent reference and its own URL. Every page is plain server-rendered HTML with schema.org JSON-LD. The whole corpus is one unauthenticated request. A reader can walk person → claim → evidence → attestation → verification → dispute.

  7. 07

    Free

    The public archive is not monetised through advertising or visibility.

    No ads, no paid placement, no promoted records, no licence on the data. If this office ever needs money, it will not come from the order things appear in.

Where a principle conflicts with a feature, the principle wins and the feature does not get built. The list of things that lost is kept at about/refusals.

The honesty policy →What stops people lying?
Principles · The Long Record