Editorial Standards

Who writes the guides

OmniTrackr is an independent site run by one person. The In order, If you liked and Discover guides, the monthly editions and the Daily puzzles are written for OmniTrackr, and the site owner reads and reviews each one before it is published. The facts in them are checked as described below before publishing, and again whenever a guide is updated.

The guides do not claim first-hand experience. When a guide says a book is slow to start or a game asks for patience, that is an editorial reading of the work and of how it is widely described, not a report of someone's weekend. We would rather say that plainly than invent a reviewer.

No studio, publisher, platform or advertiser pays to appear in a guide, to be recommended or to be placed higher in one. Advertising never decides what a guide covers.

How facts are checked

Release years, creators, cast, episode and book counts, and the order in which stories take place are checked against public sources, preferring the official page of the studio, publisher, broadcaster or author. Discover guides list every source they use, with the date it was checked. Where sources disagree, the guide follows the official one and says that editions differ.

Release years are for the first release in the original language. Running times, page counts, editions and where a title can be streamed or bought vary by region and over time, so guides describe them loosely ("around ten hours", "a long novel"). A precise number might not hold where you are.

Facts and opinions are kept apart. Comparisons of mood, pace, difficulty and who a title suits are labelled as editorial opinion. A recommended order through a franchise is the order we would hand a friend starting from nothing; the guide always gives the alternatives and says who they suit better.

How picks are chosen

• A reason for every pick. Each title is in a guide because of something specific it shares with the starting point, and the guide says what that is.
• A caveat for every pick. Each one also says who it may not suit, or what is different, so you can skip it with a clear conscience.
• More than one format. "If you liked" and Discover guides mix films, series, anime, games, books and albums, because the feeling you are chasing is rarely tied to one format.
• No popularity rankings. Guides are not built from charts, scores or what other sites list. A small, odd pick that fits beats a famous one that does not.

Spoilers

Guides describe premises, tone and structure, not endings. Mysteries keep their solutions, and franchise guides warn you before an order would give away a twist that the release order protects. The answer to a Daily puzzle stays hidden until you choose to reveal it, and today's answer never appears anywhere on the site until you have finished playing.

Corrections and updates

Every guide shows when it was first published and when it was last checked. If you find a wrong date, a missing entry, an outdated link or a spoiler, send a correction. Corrections are made on the page itself, the checked date moves forward, and a significant change is noted in What's new. If a guide's recommendation changes, the page says so.

Guides are also reread when a franchise gets a new entry or a source page changes. If we can't keep a guide accurate any more, we take it down.

Member reviews and collections

Everything in a member's library is private unless they choose otherwise. A review is public only when its author ticks Public Review on that one entry, and a collection is public only when its owner publishes it. Ratings, progress, private notes and the rest of the library are never shown alongside it.

Public reviews have to say something. A review appears in public lists once it has at least 80 characters of varied writing, and gets a page of its own only at 240 characters and 35 words, written as complete thoughts. Reviews that contain links, email addresses, phone numbers or promotional wording are kept out of public pages altogether; they stay in the author's own library, untouched. The review guidelines explain what makes a review worth reading for someone else.

Anyone can report a public review or collection by choosing a fixed reason. After reports from three separate browsers, that exact version is hidden from public pages and its author is told. Nothing is deleted: editing the review or collection substantively puts it back if it still meets the rules.

What we do not publish

• Plot summaries, reviews or descriptions copied from other sites or databases.
• Lists of titles with nothing to say about them.
• Pages written to catch a search term that don't answer the question behind it.
• Claims about features OmniTrackr does not have, or comparisons that leave out where another service is the better choice.
• Pages where advertising is more prominent than what you came to read.

Some title pages show artwork and basic details supplied by public databases such as TVmaze, Open Library and Wikipedia, credited on the page. Those details help you recognise a title, but they are not OmniTrackr's writing, so a title page is only listed for search once a member has written a substantial public review of it.

Related pages

The About page explains who runs OmniTrackr and how it is paid for. The ads and affiliates page lists where ads can appear and how affiliate links are marked. The privacy policy covers what happens to your data, and the sample library shows what a tracked library looks like, using made-up entries instead of a real member's account.