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Corrections come before everything else

A message telling me something here is wrong is worth more than any other message this site gets. It does not need to be polite and it does not need to be certain. Name the page. Say what you think the right answer is. Point at the document underneath it, if you happen to have one open.

Two kinds of correction matter more on this site than the rest, because they are the two things most likely to go stale without anybody noticing:

A price that has moved. Almost nobody in this market publishes what anything costs. That is why the price tables here exist and why they are the most useful thing on the site. A figure that has changed since it was last read is a quiet failure, and I would rather hear it from you.

A crisis detail that has changed. Services change how they are reached. Stale copy about them then stays in circulation for years, including on their own pages. If anything in that box no longer matches what the operator publishes, that is the most urgent message on this list.

Anything wrong gets fixed and the checked date moves. If the repair changes what a reader was previously being told, a line recording that stays on the page from then on.

hello@crossingtheroom.com

It is read by the person who writes the pages. There is nobody else to pass it to.

The message that will not get an answer

Every so often somebody sends a paragraph describing their child, sometimes a long and careful one, and asks what is going on with them.

That question does not get answered here. Not a short answer, not a hedged answer, not an answer with a disclaimer attached.

Being exact about why matters here. "I have to be careful" is not the real reason. Treating it as the real reason would be its own small dishonesty.

The real reason is that any answer would be worthless. A paragraph cannot carry a childhood. It cannot carry what the teenager is like at home against what they are like at school. It cannot carry what changed, or when, or what else has been going on in the house. It cannot carry the difference between them with one person and them with six. It cannot carry what they actually want. Those are the things a real answer turns on, and none of them fit in an email.

There is also a direction the error would run in. Someone writing back about a child they have never met is under quiet pressure to find something. "It sounds like there might be something here" is simply a more satisfying reply than "I cannot tell." So the guess would tend to land on the side of something being wrong.

Then it arrives carrying the authority of a website. It lands in front of a parent who is already frightened, about a teenager who is probably fine. That is not a cautious risk. That is a real harm, and it has a predictable shape.

So the answer is no. It stays no even when the person asking is a good parent having a bad month, which is most of the time.

What can be answered instead

Which page covers a situation, and what a page actually said, are both fair questions and get answered.

So is a question the site has not covered and probably should have. Several pages exist because somebody asked.

One kind of message is worth more than all the rest. Suppose you work in a school, a clinic or a programme, and a page here describes your job in a way you do not recognise. Please say so. That correction cannot be produced by anybody standing outside the work.

If what is happening at your house is urgent, this page is the wrong speed. Messages get read in batches and nobody is sitting at the other end. What is staffed around the clock sits on the crisis resources page instead.

The permanent no

Four things get the same answer every time and the answer has never changed:

• Guest posts and contributed articles.
• Link exchanges, including the version that opens by helpfully reporting a broken link.
• Sponsored placement, paid mentions, paid reviews, and being added to a list.
• Any arrangement at all where a clinic, a programme or an app gets written about here in return for money, access, a free place, a review copy or a link.

No money has come in from any of them and none will. There is no credit to claim for that. A site funded by a provider could not honestly print what that provider charges, and those prices are the part of this site that is hardest to find anywhere else.