What Pays For This Site

The arrangement

One page carries a fare form. The fields it collects are passed to a booking service, which answers on a subdomain rather than here, and a reader who then buys something from that service may earn Tallyhouse LLC a commission out of the service's own margin.

A reader who books through that form pays no more than a reader who does not. The commission is not a surcharge, it is not added to a fare, and there is no cheaper version of the same fare sitting behind it. What a reader pays does not move.

One arrangement, described completely, and there is not a second one.

What it does not buy

This list exists because a reader is entitled to ask what money changes, and the honest answer is easier to check than to assert.

• No entry is sponsored. Nobody has paid for a material to be in this catalogue, and nobody could.
• No carrier, service or company is named anywhere on this site. Not in an entry, not in an article, not in an answer on the questions page. There is nothing to be paid for naming, because naming does not happen.
• No trade is recommended. This publication does not name a mason, a supplier, a contractor or a consultant, and does not accept anything from one.
• No material is sold. Not by this house and not by anybody through it.
• No advertising is carried. There is no advertising slot on this site, and no script from anybody who would fill one.
• Nothing is measured. No analytics, no tracking, no profile of a reader. The storage page lists everything that touches a browser, and the list is four rows long.

The conflict, named

A publication that earns a commission on bookings has an obvious temptation: put the form everywhere, write the articles to feed it, and let the subject drift toward whatever gets a reader to the button.

The way that temptation is handled here is structural rather than promised.

1. The form exists on one page and appears nowhere else. Not on an entry, not on an article, not in the footer, not as a floating control.
2. The subject of the catalogue has nothing to do with travel. Eight building materials in one city cannot be written to funnel anybody toward a fare, because there is no path from a mortar joint to a departure date.
3. No carrier is named, so no carrier can be favored.
4. Nothing on the site depends on the form existing. Remove it entirely and every entry and article reads exactly as it does now.

A reader can verify all four in about a minute, which is the only reason they are worth writing down.

Why the disclosure is beside the form and not under it

Because a disclosure a reader has to go looking for is a disclosure designed not to be read. The commercial relationship is printed in the same block as the fields, above the button, in the same size as the rest of the page, on the only page where the form exists. It is repeated on the front page and it has this page to itself.

If the arrangement changes

Then this page changes on the same day, and the date at the foot of every page moves. There is no other commercial arrangement in prospect, and if one were ever added it would be described here in the same terms rather than mentioned in a policy nobody reads.