Marketplace rules — vendors must be staff-approved

Dr.PulmRoch said:

Vendor reputation tracking for vendor vetting: I maintain a personal spreadsheet with every order I've placed — date, vendor, batch number, Janoshik…

Same experience, arrived at from the opposite direction. I had assumed I was the exception until I read this.

labquiet_amy said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

Agreed, with the usual condition: that holds for the average and this board is a collection of individuals. A population claim and a personal prediction are different things and get quoted interchangeably.

That is the short version; the long version is somebody else's post.

labquiet_amy said:

If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way.

Genuinely useful, thank you. I had the facts and not the framework. Adding it to my notes with a link back to this thread.

Clinical perspective, offered as context rather than as advice. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.

Moderator note: the sourcing question belongs in the vendor section and has been split out.