Editorial policy

Last updated: 22 September 2026

This page explains who writes veldovna.online, how we establish what we publish, how the site is paid for, and what we will not do regardless of how much it would earn. It is written to be held against us: if you find us breaching it, please say so at info@veldovna.online.

Who writes this site

Editorial responsibility lies with Oliver Cook, director of publication and responsible editor for CLEAN STANDARD s.r.o.. Every article carries a named byline and a publication date. We do not publish under “the editorial team”, “staff writer” or any other anonymous label, because a byline nobody can be held to is not a byline.

If an external contributor writes for us, they are named and any interest they have in the subject is disclosed in the article itself.

How we establish what we publish

Our subject is consumer security software. In practice that means most of what we can state as fact falls into three categories, and we treat them differently:

1. How a technology works in general. How signature and behavioural detection differ, what a VPN tunnel does and does not conceal, why a password vault cannot be recovered by its provider. This is established, documented material and we explain it in our own words, with diagrams we draw ourselves.
2. What a specific product contains. Taken from the vendor's own published product and support documentation. We attribute it, and we say plainly that the vendor's current information prevails over ours, because plan contents change without notice.
3. How a product performs. This we cannot establish ourselves. We point to the independent laboratories that do test — AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives, SE Labs — and we explain how to read their reports rather than repeating a headline figure out of context.

Three rules follow from that:

• We attribute rather than assert. If a vendor claims something we cannot check — a no-logs policy, for instance — we write that the vendor claims it, and we say that we have seen no independent audit.
• We hedge what we cannot verify, and say so. “We do not know” is an acceptable sentence to publish.
• We never invent a number. Not a detection rate, not a scan time, not a user count, not a percentage of anything. If a figure appears on this site without a named source and a date, treat it as an error and tell us.

How this site is funded

veldovna.online is funded entirely by partner (affiliate) commissions. When a reader follows a partner link to a merchant and takes out a subscription, the merchant pays CLEAN STANDARD s.r.o. a commission. The reader pays the same price either way.

How that is handled:

• A disclosure bar appears at the very top of every page, before any content.
• A disclosure box appears immediately after the headline of any article containing partner links, before any promotional content.
• Every partner link is visibly labelled as a partner link, including in sidebars, and carries a short note under it stating that we earn a commission and that it costs the reader nothing extra.
• Every partner link carries rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", so search engines are told the same thing readers are.

What we do not take: we accept no payment for coverage, no payment for a favourable conclusion, no payment to remove or soften criticism, and no sponsored articles. No vendor sees an article before it is published, and no vendor has a right of review over our copy. We hold no equity in any vendor we write about.

We think the honest position is that a commission is a real interest, not an imaginary one. The defence against it is not to pretend it does not exist but to make it visible everywhere and to keep publishing the things that cost us money — which is why our main article contains a section arguing that many readers do not need to pay for antivirus at all.

Advertiser independence

Commercial arrangements are negotiated separately from editorial work and give an advertiser no influence over it. In particular:

• A commission relationship does not earn a product a recommendation, a higher placement or the removal of a criticism.
• The absence of a commission relationship is not a reason to criticise a product, and we name free and built-in alternatives — Microsoft Defender among them — where they are the sensible answer, even though they pay us nothing.
• If an advertiser asked us to change or withdraw accurate criticism, we would refuse and end the relationship rather than comply. If that ever happens we will say so on this page.

What we refuse to publish

These are absolute. There is no price at which we would do them.

• Fake testimonials. No invented reader stories, no “reader-submitted” quotes we wrote ourselves, no stock photographs presented as customers, no fabricated names. This site publishes no testimonials at all.
• Invented ratings and scores. No made-up scores out of ten, no star ratings we did not earn the right to give, no “editor's choice” badge with nothing behind it. We publish no numerical score for any product, because we do not run the tests that would justify one.
• Artificial urgency. No countdown timers, no “offer ends tonight” we cannot substantiate, no “only 3 licences left”, no fake stock levels. Prices and promotions are the vendor's, and we send you to the vendor's page to see them.
• Guaranteed-result claims. No product makes you safe, anonymous, unhackable or virus-proof, and we will not write that one does. Security is a matter of reducing risk, and we describe it that way.
• Fake alarm. No simulated scan results, no warning that the reader's device is infected, no imitation of a system dialogue. Nothing on this site attempts to frighten a reader into a click.
• Hidden advertising. No unlabelled partner link, anywhere, ever. No advertorial presented as editorial.
• Impersonation. We do not imitate a vendor's branding, do not use vendor artwork or product screenshots, and state on every page that we are not affiliated with the brands we discuss.
• Fabricated evidence. No invented statistics, no misattributed quotes, no test results we did not obtain, no citation of a report we have not read.

Illustrations

Every illustration and diagram on this site is an original SVG file drawn for it, hosted on this server, with a title, a description, alternative text and a caption. We use no stock photography, no vendor artwork and no product screenshots — partly because that would raise trademark and copyright questions on an advertising-funded page, and partly because a diagram that explains a mechanism is worth more than a picture of a user interface.

Corrections procedure

We will get things wrong. When we do, this is what happens.

1. Tell us. Email info@veldovna.online, ideally with the page address, the passage concerned and, if you have one, a source. Anyone may do this; you do not need to be the party affected.
2. We acknowledge. We aim to reply within five working days confirming that we have the request and who is looking at it.
3. We check. Against the vendor's current documentation, the laboratory report or the legal text concerned, as appropriate.
4. We act. A factual error is corrected promptly. Where the correction is material — a change to a fact a reader might have acted on — we add a dated correction note to the page itself rather than editing silently. Where we were merely unclear, we rewrite for clarity and update the “last updated” date.
5. We answer you. If we conclude that the original was right, we tell you why rather than ignoring the request.

A vendor that believes we have described its product wrongly has the same route and the same standing as any reader: send the documentation, and we will correct what is wrong. What the route does not offer is the removal of accurate criticism.

Review cycle

Articles about products are re-read periodically because plan contents and prices change. Each page shows when it was last reviewed. A page that has not been reviewed recently still says so honestly rather than showing a refreshed date with unchanged content.

Contact

Editorial correspondence, corrections and complaints: info@veldovna.online, or by post to CLEAN STANDARD s.r.o., K Žižkovu 809/7, Vysočany, 190 00 Praha 9, Czech Republic, marked for the attention of the director of publication.