Editorial policy

How content is produced

Content on makefriendsguide is AI-assisted and human-edited. Drafts are produced with the help of AI tools, then reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by our editorial team before publication. Bylines are editorial pseudonyms of that team; we never invent professional credentials.

Bylines and pen names

The byline on these pages is an editorial pen name, and it belongs to this site’s editorial team rather than to a person whose biography you could look up. It exists so that a page has somebody answerable for it, and it is stated as a pen name on the about page, next to the portrait, and here.

What the name is allowed to claim is experience of the subject and responsibility for the method: having had to build a circle from nobody more than once, and standing behind plain mechanics, behaviour described rather than people judged, and sources named in the sentence that uses them. What it never claims, and what nobody here holds: a licence, a qualification, a therapist, counsellor or coach title, an academic post, training in any method described on this site, or a checkable private life — no named city, employer, household or diagnosis. No page speaks in the first person about anybody’s health, no reader is quoted, and no number appears in a byline’s biography.

The portrait beside that byline is an illustration generated with an AI tool. It is not a photograph of a living person, it is labelled “AI-generated image” wherever it appears, and it is there to give a byline a face rather than to tell you whose.

Sourcing & statistics

Every statistic we publish is verified against a primary source (the original study, government data, or the company's own reporting) and named in the same sentence it appears. The full list lives on our sources page and statistics page. Numbers we cannot trace to a primary source do not get published.

Corrections

Found an error? Email hello@makefriendsguide.com. We correct factual errors within a week, note the correction on the affected page, and update the page's modified date honestly — it only changes when the content substantively changes.

Ownership & funding

makefriendsguide is an independent publication. This site is funded by our own products and services promoted to our email list. We do not run paid rankings.

AI transparency

We label AI-generated illustrations, allow AI crawlers to read this site (see robots.txt and llms.txt), and welcome citation of our work with attribution and a link.