How we label things
Open, waitlist, closed, or we do not currently know.
Four states, and they are never allowed to collapse into each other. The difference between two of them is the difference between a family being helped and a family giving up.
Open
Verified as accepting people, with the date we verified it shown next to the listing. This is the only state that makes a positive claim about capacity, so it is the one that expires fastest. After ninety days without reconfirmation it stops being open and becomes "worth calling to check". Not closed. Just no longer something we are willing to assert.
Waitlist
Operating, but not taking new people right now. Always shown, never hidden.
Hiding waitlisted services is a common and expensive kindness. A six month waitlist is worth joining today, and a family that never sees the listing waits six months to start waiting six months. The family is the one entitled to decide whether the wait is worth it, and they cannot decide about something they were never shown. Where we know the length of the wait, it is on the listing.
Closed
Verified as no longer operating. This is the only state that is never shown to anybody.
A closure deliberately does not expire. Every other state decays to "worth calling to check" after ninety days, but if closures decayed the same way, every organisation we had confirmed shut would quietly reappear in results on day ninety one, and we would start sending families to doors we already knew were locked. A closure is a finding that keeps its value. An opening is a perishable one.
Worth calling to check
We have not confirmed this one recently enough to stand behind it. The listing is shown with the date it was last confirmed, and it says plainly that local services change quickly.
This state exists because the alternative is worse in both directions. Hiding these listings would throw away real, usually still correct information about organisations that are almost certainly still there. Showing them as open would make a claim we have not earned. So we show them, we date them, and we tell you to call first.
Unknown is not closed
This is the rule the whole system is built around, and it is enforced in code rather than left to editorial judgement. A record we stopped verifying has not shut down. We simply stopped knowing. If we let those two render as the same thing, a family in a county nobody has researched lately would be told there is no help there, which is a statement about them that we have no basis for making. What we actually know is a statement about us.
What we do with the ranking
Once the states are settled, the order is fixed and it is not negotiable:
- County match beats distance. Proximity is not relevance. A service covering your whole county from further away will take your call.
- Open, then waitlist, then worth calling. Closed never appears.
- Authority level. A public agency outranks a listing somebody scraped.
- Freshness. Most recently confirmed first. Never confirmed sorts last, not first.
Nothing is ranked by how large an organisation is, how professional its website looks, or how much it pays us. Nobody pays us. That is deliberate and here is why.