Editorial policy

Owner: Elizabeth Jones, director of publication In force from 22 September 2026

This page is the standard we hold ourselves to. It is deliberately specific, so that a reader can tell when we have broken it.

1. Who writes here

Editorial content on novatren.online is written, edited and signed by Elizabeth Jones, director of publication and responsible editor for COSMOS CLUB s.r.o.. Every article carries:

• a named human byline — never “staff”, “editorial team” or no name at all;
• a publication date and, where the page has been revised, a last-reviewed date;
• a list of the sources used.

We do not accept guest articles from advertisers, sponsored posts written by a third party, or copy supplied by an affiliate network. Where drafting or research tools are used, the named editor is responsible for verifying every factual claim before publication and remains accountable for the published text.

2. How facts are established and sourced

In descending order of preference, a factual claim on this site rests on:

1. Primary documentation from the party concerned — a vendor's own product, licensing or pricing pages for what a product contains.
2. Independent testing laboratories that publish their methodology — for consumer security software, principally AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives.
3. Public guidance from national and European agencies — ENISA, NÚKIB, the UK NCSC, CISA, NIST.
4. Standards and specification documents where a technical mechanism is being described.

Rules we apply to every claim:

• No unsourced statistics. If we cannot point at where a number comes from, the number does not appear. We would rather write “this is common” than invent a percentage.
• Uncertainty is stated, not smoothed. Where something varies by region, version or promotion, the page says so.
• Product facts are checked against the vendor, not against other websites. Most errors in this field are copied from one affiliate page to the next.
• The publisher's own information prevails. Where our description of a product and the vendor's own current information diverge, the vendor's prevails and we correct the page.
• Prices are not quoted. Consumer security software is sold on rotating regional promotions; any figure we printed would be wrong for some readers. We describe the structure — first-term versus renewal pricing, auto-renewal — and send readers to the vendor's checkout for the number.

3. How this site is funded

novatren.online carries no display advertising and sells no subscriptions. It is funded entirely by affiliate commission: when a reader follows a partner link and buys something, the vendor's affiliate programme pays COSMOS CLUB s.r.o. a commission. The reader pays the same price either way.

Every commercial link on this site is marked rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", carries a visible “Partner link” label, and sits under a note explaining the commission. A disclosure appears in a bar at the very top of any page carrying such links and again immediately after the headline, before any promotional content. The affiliate disclosure sets this out in full.

4. What we refuse to do

This list is not aspirational. Each item is a thing we have removed from this site or declined to add.

• Fabricated testimonials. No invented customer quotes, no “reader stories”, no reviews we did not receive, no stock photography presented as a customer. This site previously used a “Reader Stories” framing for editorial content; it was misleading and it has been removed.
• Invented ratings and scores. We publish no star ratings, no scores out of ten and no “editor's choice” badges. We do not run a laboratory, so we are not in a position to award them, and a rating with nothing behind it is decoration pretending to be evidence.
• Artificial urgency. No countdown timers, no “only X left”, no “offer ends tonight” unless a vendor has published that deadline itself and we can point at it.
• Guaranteed-result claims. No security product makes anyone safe, immune or fully protected. We do not use those words, and we say plainly what a product cannot do.
• Fake scarcity, fake authority and fake affiliation. We do not imply endorsement by, or affiliation with, any brand we write about. We are not affiliated with any vendor discussed on this site.
• Manufactured alarm. No fake virus warnings, no simulated scan results, no claims about the reader's device that we have no way of knowing.
• Dark patterns. No disguised advertising, no links styled to look like navigation, no interstitial the reader has to defeat.

5. Advertiser independence

• No advertiser, affiliate network or vendor sees an article before it is published, and none has any right of review, approval or veto over anything on this site.
• Commission rates play no part in what we cover or in what we conclude. Where the commercially convenient conclusion and the accurate one differ, we publish the accurate one.
• We state a product's limitations on the same page that links to it, above the fold where the limitation is material. Our main buyer's guide states plainly that the product it links to does not include a VPN and covers only one device — because a reader who buys it expecting otherwise has been misled.
• We tell readers when they can reasonably skip the purchase, including when free software already built into their operating system may be sufficient.
• Editorial pages and commercial pages are visually and structurally distinct, and reference guides carry no commercial links at all.

6. Corrections procedure

We correct errors openly. We do not silently edit a page and pretend it always said the new thing.

1. Report it to info@novatren.online with the page address and what you believe is wrong. A source helps but is not required.
2. We acknowledge within five working days and tell you what we intend to do.
3. A factual error is corrected as soon as it is confirmed. A material correction — one that changes what a reader would reasonably conclude or decide — is recorded in a visible corrections note on the page itself, stating what was wrong and what it now says. A trivial correction, such as a typographic fix, is made without a note.
4. The last-reviewed date on the page is updated whenever the page is substantively revised.
5. If we disagree with you, we say so and explain why, rather than not replying.

A worked example of this procedure is on our main buyer's guide, where the corrections note lists ten claims from an earlier version of the page that were wrong or unsupported, what was wrong with each, and what replaced them.

7. Reader privacy as an editorial commitment

We collect nothing about readers: no cookies, no analytics, no advertising pixels, no fingerprinting, no browser storage, and no requests to third-party servers. This is an editorial choice as much as a legal one — a page that lectures readers about online safety while loading six trackers is not credible. See the cookie policy for how to verify it.

8. Contact

Editorial complaints, corrections and right-of-reply requests: info@novatren.online, or by post to COSMOS CLUB s.r.o., Waldertova 670/6, Drahovice, 360 01 Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic. Full details on the contact page.