Source order
We prefer manufacturer documentation and support notices, then official manuals, developer documentation, and regulatory records. Reliable reporting can fill gaps. Community evidence is useful for leads and carefully labeled observations, but it is not treated as automatically authoritative.
Claims and evidence are separate
A device record contains normalized claims such as lifecycle.status or dependencies.cloud_required. Each claim separately records confidence, source IDs, when it was first observed, when it was last verified, notes, and chronological history. Updating a claim does not erase its prior state.
Unknown is a first-class value
Boolean-like facts use four explicit states: true, false, unknown, and not applicable. “No source found” never silently becomes false. Lifecycle statuses also include unknown and degraded, because support is often partial rather than binary.
What validation blocks
The build rejects malformed dates, duplicate model records, unsupported claim fields or values, missing sources, sources scoped to a different model, out-of-order history, current values that disagree with history, corrupted JSON, and an empty device catalog.
What “last verified” means
It records the most recent date the cited source was checked for that claim. It is not a promise that a manufacturer has made no unannounced change. Follow the source link for the latest wording.
Corrections
The pilot has no public submission form or account system. Corrections are reviewed against model-specific evidence before the underlying record changes.
How replacement guidance is ranked
Replacement candidates live in a separate dataset from lifecycle claims. We compare exact product generations where practical, protocol and ecosystem fit, local operation, cloud dependence, continued basic operation during an outage, important limitations, and the work required to migrate. Open protocols and local control are advantages, not automatic winners; a cloud-based product can still be appropriate when its tradeoffs are stated clearly.
Editorial order is based on fit for the retired model and the ranking rationale shown on the page. Commercial link status is separate configuration and cannot change lifecycle facts or editorial rank. There are currently no affiliate or sponsored links.
Privacy-light measurement
Cloudflare Web Analytics may be enabled to report aggregate page views, visits, landing pages, referrers, coarse geography, and device type without analytics cookies or persistent visitor profiles. Replacement destination clicks are designed to record only an event type, source device ID, destination type, and replacement ID. No visitor identity is included in that event.