Editorial Standards

Editorial Standards

WunderTech publishes tutorials, guides, reviews, and comparisons covering home labs, NAS hardware, Proxmox virtualization, UniFi networking, Docker, firewalls, and self-hosted services. This page describes how that content gets made — how it’s tested, how it’s updated, how errors are corrected, and how sponsorships and affiliate relationships affect (or don’t affect) what gets published.

If you find something on this site that doesn’t match these standards, please contact me, and I’ll fix it.

Who Writes WunderTech

Every article on this site is written by Frank Joseph, founder of WunderTech. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems and an MBA, and I have 15+ years of experience in corporate IT and application management. The same topics covered on this site are also covered on the WunderTech YouTube channel (90K+ subscribers), under the same editorial standards.

There are no ghostwriters, no outsourced content, and no anonymous contributors. If an article appears on this site, I wrote it.

Hands-On Testing

Every technical tutorial on WunderTech is based on work I’ve actually done in my own home lab. I don’t publish instructions I haven’t personally executed.

When I write about setting up Proxmox, configuring pfSense, installing Home Assistant, or deploying a Docker stack, I’ve run those exact steps on my own hardware. My current home lab — the specific hardware, versions, and network configuration, everything on this site is built on top of — is documented at My Complete Home Lab.

Where a tutorial involves software running on specific hardware, the hardware used during testing is named in the article.

How Reviews Are Written

Product reviews on WunderTech fall into three categories, and the category that applies is always disclosed in the article:

  1. Hardware I purchased and use daily. These reviews are written from weeks or months of actual ownership, not from a short review window.
  1. Hardware sent to me for review. When a brand sends me hardware to test, it’s clearly disclosed at the top of the article. Receiving free hardware does not guarantee a positive review or even that I’ll publish a review at all. My full policy on sponsored content and review samples is in the Ethics Statement.
  1. Hardware compared based on research, not hands-on testing. Some buyer guides recommend products I haven’t personally tested. When that’s the case, the article says so explicitly — I don’t pretend to have hands-on experience with gear I haven’t used.

Buyer guides that recommend multiple products are a mix of these three categories, and the basis for each recommendation is called out within the guide.

Updates, Revisions, and Freshness

Software covered on this site changes — Synology releases DSM updates, Proxmox ships new versions, UniFi redesigns its interface, Docker images get deprecated. Tutorials have to be maintained, not just published and abandoned.

An article on WunderTech is updated when one of the following is true:

  • The software, service, or hardware covered has a meaningful version change that affects the steps
  • A reader reports that the steps no longer work as written
  • I discover a better approach while using the tool myself
  • A fact in the article is wrong
  • A product recommendation has been superseded by something I’d now recommend instead

Minor edits (typos, formatting, broken-link fixes) do not update the article’s published date.

Substantive content changes (added sections, rewritten steps, updated screenshots, new recommendations) update the article’s published date to reflect when the revision happened. This is why some articles that were written years ago have an updated publish date — it means the article was originally written on the earlier date and meaningfully revised on the later one.

Articles that haven’t been updated recently are not necessarily outdated — many tutorials cover steps that haven’t changed in years. But if I know an article is out of date and hasn’t been refreshed yet, that status is noted at the top of the article.

Corrections

If you find a factual error, a broken command, an outdated step, or a misleading recommendation in any article, please email me or leave a comment on the article. I respond to every correction report.

Errors will be corrected as quickly as possible — typically within a few days for minor fixes, longer for corrections that require retesting in my home lab. For material factual errors, the correction is noted at the bottom of the article along with the date it was corrected, so readers can see what changed.

Sources and Attribution

Technical tutorials reference official vendor documentation, community wikis, relevant GitHub issues, and my own testing. Where a specific claim depends on an external source — a vendor changelog, a CVE advisory, a benchmark from another publication — that source is linked inline.

If an article is significantly informed by another person’s prior work (a specific blog post, a GitHub repo, a forum thread that solved a problem), that work is credited. I don’t repackage other people’s content and present it as original research.

AI Usage

Here’s where I stand on AI tools in content production:

What AI does NOT do on this site: AI does not generate the final article text published here. I do not publish AI-written tutorials. I do not publish AI-written reviews. Every article on this site is written by me, in my voice, based on my own hands-on testing.

What AI does do on this site: I use AI tools the same way I use spell-check, a dictionary, or Grammarly — as an editing and research aid. That can mean checking grammar, rephrasing a clunky sentence, or quickly surfacing reference documentation during research. The underlying knowledge, testing, opinions, and recommendations are mine; AI is a tool that helps me communicate them more clearly.

I call this out explicitly because the AI content landscape has changed a lot in the last two years, and I think readers deserve to know where the writing actually comes from.

Affiliate Links and Sponsored Content

WunderTech earns revenue through affiliate links (Amazon, geni.us, and others) and occasional sponsored content. Here’s how that affects what gets published:

  • Affiliate links exist in many articles on this site. When you click an affiliate link and make a purchase, WunderTech earns a commission at no cost to you. Affiliate links are marked as rel="sponsored nofollow" in the HTML and routed through tracked redirects.
  • Affiliate relationships do not affect which products I recommend. I link to products I think are worth buying. If a product isn’t worth buying, I don’t include it in a recommendation list just because it has an affiliate program. If the best product in a category doesn’t have an affiliate program, it still gets recommended — I just don’t earn anything when readers buy it.
  • Sponsored content is always labeled. When an article or YouTube video is sponsored by a brand, that sponsorship is disclosed at the top of the content. Sponsorship buys me the time to create content about a product; it does not buy the conclusion. My full sponsor policy is on the Ethics Statement.
  • Editorial independence is not negotiable. Sponsors do not get to review articles or videos before publication, except to fact-check specific factual claims about their own product. They do not get editorial approval. They do not get to change my opinions. If a sponsor asks for those things, I decline the sponsorship.

Full details on how sponsored opportunities are handled are on the Ethics Statement.

Where to Reach Me