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Editorial policy

This site previously published things that were not true. These are the rules that exist so it does not happen again, and a record of what was taken down.

The rules

  1. Every factual claim carries a source and a date. Wage rates, subsidy amounts, trade durations and entry requirements are quoted from a named government page, with the date we read it at the bottom of the page. If we cannot source it, it does not go up.
  2. We do not publish a listing we cannot verify. A company appears in the index only if it is a real, identifiable New Zealand business whose own website resolves, and the listing records the site it was checked against and when.
  3. We assert name, trade and region — nothing else. No ratings, no rankings, no characterisation of any employer as good or bad.
  4. No review is published that a real apprentice did not write. There is currently no review mechanism on this site at all.
  5. Where a source is silent, we say nothing. We do not fill gaps with what sounds plausible.
  6. Any listed business can have its listing corrected or removed on request, without having to explain why. Contact us.

What was removed

  • 36 fabricated apprentice reviews of 29 real, named New Zealand employers, including fabricated negative reviews with invented star ratings across pay, mentorship, work-life and training. Deleted in full.
  • AggregateRating structured datagenerated from those reviews and attached to each real company's Organization schema — invented ratings served to search engines. The code that produced it has been removed, not just the values.
  • A live counter presenting seeded fixtures as real activity on the homepage.
  • 44 test-harness user records, including password hashes, that should never have been committed.
  • 39 trade-by-region pages of roughly 35 words each — doorway pages with nothing on them.
  • 11 employer listings we could not verify, including one test fixture and ten records with no working website. Of the 53 in the old data set, 42 were confirmed against a live domain and kept.

What we still do not have

Reviews. Getting real ones requires a moderation policy, a right of reply for the businesses named, and apprentices willing to write them. Until all three exist, this site carries none — and its name is a statement of intent rather than a description.