Current implementation: The live directory and Stumble use approved, public listings. The checking and correction procedures below are editorial responsibilities. Editors must unpublish stale, disputed, closed, or removal-requested entries; no automated check-log, scheduled recheck, or downloadable export is claimed. Contact uses the contact form, which asks for a reply email and needs no login. The current discovery rules describe the implemented draw.
A register is a set of claims about the world, and the world does not hold still while you check it. Businesses close on a Tuesday without telling anyone. Domains lapse. A site gets rebuilt and half its addresses stop resolving. None of that waits for our re-check schedule.
So at some point the surface will hand you something that does not work. This is what to do about it, what happens next, and why the entry may still be sitting there a fortnight after you told us.
What this is, and who it is for
For anyone who clicks a link from here and finds nothing on the other end. It is written before the surface opens, because a reporting route explained after the first broken link is a route explained too late.
Scope: this is a failure-handling specification, not an incident report or claim about a deployed populated surface. The check-date rule exists so a consumer can judge stale evidence; the reasoning is at why entries go stale at all.
The four kinds of broken
They look similar from the outside and they have completely different outcomes, so it is worth being able to tell them apart before reporting.
| What you found | What it usually means | What happens to the entry |
|---|---|---|
| Dead link. Nothing loads, an error page, a parked page, or a registrar holding page. | The site is gone, or the address changed and nothing was left behind. | Starts the check sequence. Ends in a re-check or a tombstone. |
| Moved site. It redirects somewhere else, or the business is clearly the same one at a new address. | A rebuild, a new domain, a rebrand. | Re-reviewed against the bar, not tombstoned. The entry is updated with a new date. |
| Changed business. The site loads and works, but it is no longer selling the thing our description says. | The business pivoted, dropped a line, or changed what it is. | Re-reviewed. Either the description is corrected or the entry no longer meets the bar and is removed. |
| Closed business. A closure notice, a shuttered shop, a final post. | It has stopped trading. | Confirmation sequence, then a tombstone at the record of businesses that have gone. |
The last two are worth separating carefully. A business that changed is not a business that failed, and an entry removed because it no longer matches its description is not an accusation about anybody. Removal from this register means one thing only: it no longer meets the published bar.
Why we have not caught it yet
Not because nobody is checking. Because checking happens on a cadence and the world does not.
Entries are re-checked on a published schedule that varies by entry type, with physical businesses checked more often than online-only ones because their details decay faster. Between two checks there is a window, and in that window an entry can be wrong while still displaying a date that says somebody looked. The date is the honest part. It tells you when we looked, not that we are looking now.
There is no live status light on this site and there will not be one. A green dot implies real-time knowledge of a business we do not have. A date makes the same information available without the lie. Our method sets out the check procedure, the cadence and the failure conditions.
How to report it, in one step
Go to report a correction and say which entry and what you found. That is the whole thing.
- No account.
- The contact form asks for an email address so the team can handle your report. No account is needed.
- No form fields about yourself.
- No minimum standard of evidence. "This link is dead" is a perfectly good report.
- No need to be right. Reports are logged whether or not they turn out to be correct, and a mistaken report is still information about how the page reads.
If you are the operator and you want the entry gone rather than fixed, the removal route is faster, free, requires no reason, and involves no attempt to change your mind.
There is nothing in this for you and there is not going to be. No points, no badge, no contributor rank, no leaderboard, no thank-you credit on the entry. This is not modesty about the value of the report. It is that the moment reporting earns something, reporting starts happening for the reward, and a register whose error reports are gamed is worse than one with fewer reports.
What happens to your report, in order
- It is logged. With what was reported and when, before anyone has decided whether it is right.
- It suspends the entry from the rotation. Immediately, on the report alone. A pending question is reason enough to stop handing something to strangers unasked, even though it is not yet reason to change anything.
- A check runs. The report starts a check rather than an edit. This is the part that feels slow and is the part that matters, because a report is not a confirmation.
- If the check passes, the entry gets a new date and returns to the rotation, and the report is recorded as not upheld with the reason. This happens and is not embarrassing.
- If the check fails, it does not end there. The published threshold is two failures separated by at least fourteen days, followed by a person confirming it independently.
- If it is confirmed, the outcome depends on which kind of broken it was. Moved or changed gets re-reviewed against the bar. Confirmed closed becomes a tombstone with its final check date. Nothing is silently deleted.
- If we published something wrong, the page is corrected in place with a visible note and the correction goes in the public log with a date. What happens when a check fails follows that sequence through in detail.
Why it may still be listed a fortnight later
This is the part people find annoying, and the annoyance is the intended trade.
Marking a trading business as closed is the most damaging error this site can make. A missing entry costs an operator very little. A public record saying their business has gone, when it has not, costs them something real and is exactly the kind of claim that ought to be hard to make by accident. So the threshold is deliberately slow on purpose: two failed checks separated by at least fourteen days, then a human confirmation.
A single failed check is not evidence of much. Sites go down. Certificates expire on a Friday. Hosts have bad afternoons. A shop closes for two weeks in August. Any of those produces exactly the same signal as a business that has ceased trading, and the difference only becomes visible with time.
So between your report and the outcome, the entry is suspended from the rotation but still visible in the register. That is not us ignoring you. It is the entry sitting in the state that says a question has been raised and not yet answered.
Where you can see the outcome
The outcome is recorded in two public places. A log with no entries states that directly; it is still the complete record for its category.
- Gone is where every entry confirmed as no longer trading is kept, with its final check date and what was observed. It never states why a business closed unless the owner published a reason, in which case they are quoted with a capture date.
- The correction log holds every factual error, what it was, what it should have said, how it was caught, what changed, and how long the fix took. The "how it was caught" column records whether it was us, a reader or the operator, and it is not rounded in our favour.
If you left an email address you will be told the outcome directly. If you did not, the log is where it appears. Nothing is resolved privately.
In Plain English
What it means. Links here will break, because checks happen on a schedule and businesses do not. Reporting one takes a sentence and no account. The entry stops being shown while the report is open, and confirming a closure deliberately takes longer than you would like.
Who it helps. Anyone who hits a dead link and wants to know whether it goes anywhere, and any operator who would rather we got this right slowly than wrongly quickly.
When to use it. The moment you find one. There is no threshold of certainty to clear first.
What to do next. Use the handling format at corrections. Any implementation claiming to process the report must record its dated outcome; this article does not claim one has been processed.
Common questions
What if I am not sure whether it is actually broken?
Report it anyway. Sorting out "temporarily down" from "gone" is the job of the check sequence, and it is a job that needs time rather than certainty from you.
Does reporting a business harm it in any way?
No. A report suspends an entry from the rotation and starts a check. It is not a complaint, it is not recorded against the business, and if the check passes the entry simply carries on with a fresher date.
Can I report something that is wrong rather than broken, like a bad description?
Yes, and those are the more useful reports. A description that misrepresents what a business does is a factual error and goes through the same route.
Why not just remove the entry immediately and put it back if you were wrong?
Because a removal that turns out to be wrong has already been published. The register is small enough that leaving one questionable entry suspended for a fortnight costs less than a wrongly tombstoned business costs its owner.
Report a broken entry
Found one that does not work, or an entry that no longer matches the business behind it? Report it at corrections. One sentence is enough, no account is needed, and the outcome goes in the public log either way. The rotation rules explain what happens to a suspended entry in the meantime.