How the three buckets are decided
Sorting is the only work this site does, so the rule for sorting had better be written down. It is one question asked three times.
The rule
- Can I describe a situation where this statement is false? If no, it goes in ALWAYS.
- Can I describe a situation where it is true? If no, it goes in NEVER.
- If both, it goes in DEPENDS, and the situations I just described are the conditions.
That third line is the whole reason DEPENDS pages are longer than the others. Sorting a claim into DEPENDS creates an obligation to list what it depends on.
What ALWAYS has to survive
A statement in ALWAYS has to hold across every version of the software, every browser, every country and every mood the network is in. If the reason it holds is a policy, it does not belong here. Policies change on a Tuesday.
The things that survive tend to be arithmetic or definition. An address is a fixed length because the encoding says so. A signature covers exactly the bytes it covers. Money that left your wallet is somewhere else now. None of that is a rule anybody decided to enforce.
What NEVER has to survive
NEVER is the mirror image and it is harder to use well. It is tempting to file anything unlikely there. Unlikely is not never. If a determined person with resources could make it happen, the statement is DEPENDS and the resources are the condition.
The NEVER pages here fall into two groups. One group is impossible for the same reason ALWAYS statements are inevitable, because the maths forbids it. The other group is categorical, meaning the thing described is not the kind of thing that can happen, like a screenshot proving anything about a page you did not load yourself.
What DEPENDS has to name
A DEPENDS page that says it varies is worthless. Every one of them has to answer four things.
- What are the variables, listed by name.
- Which direction does each one push the outcome.
- Which of them can you see from where you are.
- Which of them do you control.
The third and fourth are where the useful advice hides. Plenty of outcomes depend on something invisible to you, and knowing that is better than a fake estimate. It tells you to stop refreshing and go do something else.
Boundary cases
Some claims sit on a line. The test we use is to try to break the statement with the weakest possible counterexample. If the counterexample requires a person to behave badly, it is usually DEPENDS. If it requires a computer to do something it cannot do, it is usually ALWAYS or NEVER.
A worked example. Somebody says an awazon mirror is safe because it starts with the right eight characters. The claim as stated is that a prefix identifies the address. Can a computer produce a different address with the same prefix? Yes, cheaply. So the claim is not merely weak, it is false as stated, and it goes in NEVER. See the page on prefix checking.
Another. Somebody says deposits take twenty minutes. Can that be true? Yes, often. Can it be false? Yes, constantly. Both, so DEPENDS, and the page owes you the variables. See deposit time.
Where the statements come from
From forum posts, from chat rooms, from the front pages of other link sites, and from the things people repeat to each other without checking. They are written here in roughly the words people use, not cleaned up into careful prose, because the sloppy version is the one being believed.
Nothing here is sourced to a named person. Attribution would be theatre. If a statement is common enough to be worth sorting, it has no single author.