What a directory cannot verify

What is actually observed here

Four things, each with a mechanism behind it:

• Every record was read against a written bar before it was published, and the record prints which numbered clauses it cleared and on what date. The bar is at /standard; how it is applied is on how we verify.
• A government-issued document was checked before publication — by an automated identity check, or by a person here when the automated one cannot run — and each record prints which of the two methods was used.
• Every Mainstayer answers a check every week — miss a week and the record leaves every list a client sees.
• The description is the Mainstayer’s own writing. Nothing here is generated and nothing is rewritten, and a near-copy of another record is held rather than published.

What cannot be verified, and why

Any rate, by anyone

No money passes through this site. There is no escrow, no invoicing, no payment processing and no commission — you pay the freelancer directly, by whatever method the two of you agree. The consequence is unavoidable: every rate on this register is stated by the person whose record it is, and this site never verifies one.

This generalises past us. Only a platform that processes the payment can verify what was paid, and even then it has verified a past transaction rather than the price of your job. A rate presented as verified by a party that never saw the money is a claim with nothing behind it. What actually determines a price is on what a freelancer should cost.

Reply speed, response rate, or “usually replies within an hour”

There is no messaging here. No inbox, no proposals, no threads. When you spend a reveal you get contact details and you write to the person yourself. So this site sees no correspondence at all and can publish no reply time, no response rate and no responsiveness badge — and it never will.

Where you do see such a figure, it is measured inside that platform’s own messaging, and it stops describing anything the moment the conversation moves to email — which, for real work, it always does.

Whether somebody is good at the work

The reading checks that the claimed skills match the work shown. It does not judge whether the work is any good; that is a question about your standards and your context. The way to answer it is to buy a small piece of work: how to brief and trial a freelancer.

That a portfolio is theirs

Beyond what a reading can catch — prose copied from elsewhere, samples that contradict the claimed skills — it cannot be established here that a work sample was produced by the person showing it. This is the most consequential limit on the page, and how to check a freelancer profile is real is the procedure that closes it, by asking for the middle of the work rather than the finished artefact.

That this is the only person with that name

A document check confirms a document and the person presenting it. It does not establish uniqueness. Namesakes are common and nothing here deduplicates people, so no claim about uniqueness is published on this site. An operator is alerted when a verified name matches another, and looks — but a match is a prompt to a human, never an automatic refusal.

Right to work, criminal record, insurance, company registration, tax status

None of these is checked. A document check is not a background check, not a right-to-work check, and not a credit check. We ask each freelancer which country they are tax-resident in and keep it as a tax record; it decides nothing about who is listed, and it is not published on their record. If your engagement needs any of the above — regulated work, work with vulnerable people, work requiring insurance — that is your check to run, and no directory anywhere has done it for you.

Tomorrow

The weekly check establishes that somebody was present in the last seven days. It does not say they are free, that they want your job, that they will quote the rate on their record, or that they will reply to you at all. A record that goes quiet drops out of every list automatically, which makes the list current — it does not make anybody on it available.

What this means for how you hire

The three things that survive every gap above, and none of them needs a platform:

1. Buy a small piece of real work before you commit to a large one, and pay for it — the trial procedure.
2. Write the scope down, including what a change of mind costs.
3. Pay through a method that leaves a record. Nothing you agree passes through this site, so there is no dispute process here and no arbitration, and your paper trail is your protection.

If somebody on this register asks you for money to start before any work exists, tell us. Every record carries a report link and reports go to a person.

The question to ask any platform, including this one

“Which of these do you observe, and which are you repeating from the profile?”

Ask it about the rate, the availability, the response time, the portfolio and the identity. The answer is usually shorter than the badge suggests. Ours is on this page, and it is the whole of it.