What a shift is not

The exclusion rules are the interesting part of this notebook. If a change fails any of the tests below, it is not on this site. That is the reason you can read a page here without stopping to weigh whether someone is trying to move a price, sell an angle, or start a rumour.

It is not a hot take

A shift is something observed over a period long enough that a second reader would notice the same difference between before and now. A single strong reaction to a single evening on the market is not a shift. If the change has not been visible for at least a few weeks of use, it is not filed here.

It is not an announcement

If the change is something the market posted, it belongs on the market. This notebook watches the things the market did not announce. A quiet drift in how the checkout warns you is inside scope. A staff post on the news tab is not.

It is not a rumour about people

Nothing here names a vendor, an admin or a mod. Nothing here says who did what. Every entry is about a pattern, not a person. If a shift can only be described by naming someone, it has to wait until it can be described without naming anyone.

It is not a number

No percentages, no counts, no averages. Not because the underlying numbers would be uninteresting, but because they cannot be given honestly on a site that does not run monitoring. So the notebook goes without them, on purpose, and describes shifts in words that keep their honesty when they are proven wrong.

It is not a status page

This site never says whether an address is up. It never tests one. Uptime is a different job, done by a different kind of page. Some of the shifts filed here do concern how the market behaves under load, and they still avoid a status claim, because the entry can be right about the behaviour and wrong about the specific minute.

It is not advice

The "what to do differently" line on each entry is an adjustment, not a plan. It tells you what to check next, or what to stop assuming, given the shift. It does not tell you what to buy, what not to buy, or who to buy from. The notebook has nothing to sell.

For contrast, what a shift is

A concrete change in the way the market or its readers behave, visible for at least a few weeks, describable without naming anyone, illustrated by a "before" and a "now" a second reader could recognise, and followed by an adjustment the reader can actually make. That is the shape. See how the notebook is put together for the seven-part template every entry follows.