Editorial policy

Independence

No advertiser, retailer or manufacturer sees content on this site before it is published. None has ever been offered the opportunity, and none will be.

We accept no sponsored placements, no paid inclusion in roundups, and no free machines, samples or loans. Those are all zero and they are the kind of zero where zero is the right number.

The site is funded by Amazon Associates commission, which is described in full on the disclosure page. Commission rate is not one of the five ranking criteria on the methodology page and never has been.

Separation of the money from the rankings

There are three practical mechanisms rather than a promise:

1. The ranking criteria are published. Five of them, weighted equally, all derived from manufacturer-published specifications. None is commercial.
2. Machines we cannot earn on are still covered. The entire longarm tier is authorized-dealer only and earns us nothing. It has a page with real dealer prices and no buy button, because it answers the question people are asking.
3. Every roundup names something to skip. Recommending against a machine costs us money by definition. Every roundup does it, and every machine in our registry carries a “skip it if” line.

What we publish, and what we refuse to

Every specification on this site was read from a manufacturer’s own page and links back to it. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing, the cell stays empty and we name the manufacturer.

We do not:

• Claim to have tested a machine. We have tested none, and we say so everywhere.
• Invent a specification, price, rating or review count.
• Publish Review, reviewRating or aggregateRating structured data for any machine. Our visible scores are editorial and stay out of the machine-readable layer.
• Publish testimonials. We have no customers and therefore no reviews.
• Claim a credential the author does not hold, or imply tenure, expertise or a test facility.
• Build an affiliate link for a program we have not joined, or a buy button for a machine that cannot be bought through one.

Corrections

Our entire proposition is that the numbers here can be checked against their sources. That only works if we fix the ones that are wrong.

If you find a figure that does not match its cited source page, tell us. Use the contact form or email info@hoopandhem.com. It is the one kind of message we always answer.

What happens next:

1. We check the figure against the manufacturer page it cites.
2. If it is wrong, we correct it and update the page’s modified date so the change is visible in the sitemap and the feed.
3. If the manufacturer changed the figure rather than us misreading it, we update the figure and note the change on the reference table’s verified date.
4. If a correction changes a recommendation, we say so on the page rather than quietly swapping the winner.

Update cadence

Daily: the live price layer refreshes. This is automated and does not change any page’s content, so it never bumps a page’s modified date - a sitemap that claims every page changed every day is a sitemap nobody believes.

Monthly: the two reference tables are re-verified against the manufacturer pages they cite. Any changed figure gets updated with a new verified date.

Quarterly: every roundup is re-checked for discontinued models, changed availability and changed winners.

Annually: year-stamped content is refreshed. A page still ranking with a stale year on it is a failure of maintenance, not of writing.

Bylines and attribution

Everything on this site is written by Scooter M., framed as an enthusiast. The byline names a person because a real person is accountable for the numbers, and the author page sets out exactly what that byline does and does not claim.

We do not use an unattributed “editorial team” byline to imply staff that do not exist.

Sources

Manufacturer product pages and specification tables, first. Authorized dealer listings only where a manufacturer page could not be retrieved, and labeled as such - handiquilter.com returned HTTP 403 to our request on 1 September 2026, so the Handi Quilter figures on this site are dealer-sourced and say so.

Every page ends with the list of sources consulted. Nothing here comes from memory.