Source trust

Not every website deserves the same weight. Watcher grades each collected item into one of four tiers, and the tier decides whether that item can support a confirmed alert or only an unconfirmed one.

Tier	Meaning	Can it confirm an alert?
official	The authoritative source — a government body, the project itself	Yes
trusted	A vetted secondary source, fast and generally reliable	Yes
unknown	Recognised as a site, but not graded	No — capped at the weak tier
low	Known to be unreliable	No — never lifts an alert above weak

The default is deny

This is the behaviour that surprises people most:

An ungraded source cannot confirm anything

If nothing grades the site an alert came from, Watcher treats it as unrated and caps the alert at the weak tier. It is a precision-first default: an unknown site should be able to raise a possibility, not declare a fact.

Watcher ships a small curated list of domains it recognises. Anything outside it starts ungraded — which means a watch pointed at a niche site, a company blog, or a non-English portal will produce “unconfirmed” alerts until you say otherwise.

There are three ways to fix that, in increasing order of bluntness.

1. Grade the domain (recommended)

Add a rule to your own trust registry — per account, and it applies to every watch you own:

curl -X PUT https://<your-api>/trust-registry/example.gov \
  -H "authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"tier":"official"}'

The admin panel and the Android app both have a screen for this. Rules match a domain and its subdomains, and the most specific rule wins. See Manage the trust registry.

2. Tag the source

If a source is the authority — you are reading the project’s own feed — say so on the source:

sources:
  - type: rss
    value: "https://nodejs.org/en/feed/blog.xml"
    trust: official

Search sources are scoped on purpose

An explicit trust on a search source only applies to results whose host the source itself names — through a URL, a site: term, or officialDomains. A broad query tagged official does not launder arbitrary results into officialdom.

3. Opt out of the check entirely

allowUnratedStrong: true

This restores the older, more permissive behaviour for one watch: an item with no resolvable tier may fire a confirmed alert on confidence alone. Use it knowingly.

Pinning a search to official domains

- type: search
  value: "2026 examination result"
  hints:
    officialDomains: ["example.gov"]

This does two things: it restricts the search to those domains, and it implies those results are official.

When sources disagree

If several sources support the same event across different tiers, Watcher surfaces the evidence link from the most authoritative one. An official notice wins over a news write-up of the same event, so the link in your alert points at the primary source.

Going deeper

• Decision rules — where trust enters the gate.
• Manage the trust registry — the task guide.