How this is made

Crawlspace is built from a research sweep, not from someone’s experience. This page describes exactly what that means, including the parts that are weak.

Every claim carries its own evidence

A claim only appears here if it came with a direct quote from a named source. The quote is on the page, one click from the claim. If a claim’s only evidence turned out to be the title of the page it cited - which proves which document was read and nothing about what it says - the claim was dropped rather than published.

Claims are separated by what kind of thing they are

The single most useful distinction on this site is between what an operator has documented and what the field merely repeats. They are never mixed together.

What the rules actually say: Quoted straight from the people who make or enforce the rules.
Measured finding: Something someone actually measured, with the method attached.
Practical effect: What is observed to happen in practice, as distinct from what is documented.
Changed on: A dated change. This is where advice quietly stops being true.
Disputed between sources: Sources that do not agree, presented without picking a winner.
Often said, but we could not find it in the rules: Lots of people say this. We went looking for an official source that backs it up and could not find one, so treat it as something people repeat rather than something settled.

Sources are graded by who published them

The grade is about who is speaking, never about whether they are right. A vendor study with a named method and a real sample is better evidence than a trade-press summary of it; the grade just tells you whose incentive is in the room.

first party: The operator of the thing being described, or the body that defines it.
academic: Peer-reviewed research, a working paper, or official statistical work, by people with no stake in the result. On what something DOES, this is usually the strongest evidence here.
advocacy: A body that exists to advise or represent people in this field, without operating or selling in it. Often the clearest writing on a subject, and still not the source of the rule.
trade press: A publication reporting on the field.
vendor: A company selling something in the field it is describing.
other: Anything else, including personal sites and archives.

The verdict is checked against the claims

The verdict at the top of each subject is written from that subject’s established claims and nothing else, then judged against those same claims by a separate pass. When the judge names a statement it cannot support, the verdict goes back once with those statements quoted, to be rewritten as the narrower thing the claims do support - naming the specific source, date or scope instead of generalising.

A verdict that still fails after that is not published. The subject then shows its claims with no verdict at all, because a summary this site cannot stand behind is worth less than the absence of one.

The judge fails closed. A reply it cannot read counts as a refusal, not as a pass - the opposite default would mean a broken check looked exactly like a clean one.

Repeated ideas get looked up, one at a time

Some claims here are repetitions: a named publication said something, and no primary source came with the quote. That is a fact about what this site has read, not about the idea, and treating the two as the same thing would be the worst mistake available to a site like this one. So each repeated idea gets checked on its own - the results are here.

Checking means going and looking for the source: the operator’s own documentation, the original study, the paper, the dataset. Following the trail backwards through the retellings until it lands somewhere primary or runs out. Four things can come back. A primary source says it. A primary source says the OPPOSITE. A real source exists but says something narrower than the retelling. Or the trail ends in another retelling and nothing else.

Every one of those carries what was searched, and so does the page. A “we found nothing” with no search behind it reads exactly like a thorough one, so the searches are shown and you can judge whether they were any good. If you know the source we missed, that is the most useful thing you can send us.

What this does not do

It is not a ranking-factor list. Nothing here tells you what will move a position, because almost nothing in the public record actually establishes that.
Absence of a claim is not evidence of absence. If a subject has three claims, that means three survived, not that three exist in the world.
The grounding check catches invention, not every overstatement. Tested adversarially, it reliably rejects fabricated numbers and events. It is more permissive about a summary that says “always” where the claims only support“since 2015”.
Dates are the date of the evidence, not the date a thing became true. A claim dated 2016 may have been true for years before, and may have quietly stopped being true since.
Refused claims are not necessarily false. They are claims whose evidence did not support them as written. Several are probably true and badly sourced. All of them are here - on their own page rather than beside the answers, because a note about our wording sitting next to a claim reads as a warning about the claim.
“No source found” is not “no source exists”. It means a search was run and came back empty, on the date shown. Sources get published, and a negative ages faster than a positive one.

Who makes this, and who pays for it

Nobody pays for this. I take no money from anyone - no advertising, no sponsorship, no referral fees, no government or industry funding, and nothing from any business named on this site. There is nothing for sale here and no interest to disclose.

I am not asking you to trust me. That is the whole design. Every claim on this site carries the quote it came from and a link to the page it is on, so you can check it against the source yourself and never have to take my word for anything.

How current this is

Every claim carries the date its quote was true, shown next to the claim. That date is when the source said it, which is the only date this site can state honestly.

The aim is to re-check the whole corpus monthly. Renting and consumer law both move - rules commence, thresholds change, regulators redraft their guidance - and a reference site that quietly stops keeping up is worse than none, because the citations make it look maintained. If the date at the bottom of the home page is months old, treat what is here as a starting point and check the source links before relying on it.

Corrections

If a claim here is wrong, or its quote does not say what the claim says, that is a defect worth fixing. Every claim carries its source so you can check it, which is the point. The full source list is here.