Editorial standards
Most of what follows is not a promise — it is a rule the build enforces, and a release that breaks one does not ship. Where something depends on human judgement instead, this page says so plainly.
Last revised 20 August 2026.
Where the messages come from
All 578 are written and edited in-house. Nothing is scraped, reprinted, or collected from elsewhere on the web, which is also why you will not find the same wording here that appears on twenty other sites.
They are written by people who have had to send these messages, not compiled from a list of greeting-card phrases. Where a message carries a specific detail — a handover document, a migration, a Tuesday habit — that detail is illustrative, put there so you can see where your own version of it goes.
What has to be true before a page exists
A page is only created once it holds enough to be worth landing on. These are gates rather than targets: nothing is padded to clear one, and anything below the line simply has no page yet.
- An occasion earns a page at 20 messages.
- A recipient within an occasion earns one at 8.
- A tone or length page earns one at 15, and only if someone has also written the guidance explaining when that tone is the wrong choice. The build refuses to generate one without it.
There are no placeholder pages, no "coming soon", and no page that exists only to catch a search term. An occasion still filling up appears in the index with its real count, so you can see exactly how far along it is.
What the build refuses to ship
These are checks, not intentions. Each one fails the release rather than filing a warning somebody reads later.
- No near-duplicates. Every pair of messages is compared for similarity, and anything above the threshold stops the build. Length variations of one idea are not two messages.
- No typed counts. Every number shown anywhere on this site is measured from the data when the site is built — message counts, word counts, the figures on the about page, the thresholds above.
- No duplicate titles or descriptions.Two pages that would appear identically in a result cannot both ship.
- No thin pages. Body length, title length and description length are all bounded, and a page outside those bounds fails.
- No dead internal links. The whole link graph is walked on every release, and guidance that points at a page which has not cleared its threshold drops the link rather than shipping a broken one.
Review, and what the dates mean
The dates shown on pages are read from this site's own revision history when it is built. "Last updated" means the archive actually changed, not that a deploy ran — a date that moved every time the site was rebuilt would be worth nothing.
Outside a full checkout those dates cannot be read, and the line is dropped rather than replaced with a guess. If you do not see a date on a page, that is why.
There is deliberately no per-page "reviewed on" stamp. A review date is a claim only a person can make, and generating one automatically would be inventing a fact to fill a field — which is the opposite of what a standards page is for.
Authorship
The archive is written and edited in-house and no individual byline is attached to it. The structured data on every page names Propounded as the author for the same reason: that is who is accountable for the wording, and attaching an invented name to it would be a false credential.
If that changes — if a named editor takes responsibility for a section — this page and the bylines will change with it, and not before.
Corrections
Two kinds of thing get fixed here. Factual errors — a claim about etiquette that is wrong, guidance that misstates how something is normally done — are corrected as soon as they are confirmed. Judgement calls, where the advice is defensible but you disagree with it, are worth raising too; several of the "what not to write" entries exist because someone pushed back.
A published address for corrections is not yet listed on this site. Until one is, this section describes the standard applied rather than a route to invoke it.