Manage the trust registry

Your trust registry is a per-account list of domain-to-tier rules, layered over Watcher’s built-in list. It is the single most useful screen most people never open.

Why you probably need one rule

An ungraded source is capped at the weak “unconfirmed” tier. Watcher recognises only a small curated set of domains, so the site you care about almost certainly starts ungraded — and every alert from it arrives unconfirmed until you grade it.

The tiers

Tier	Use for	Effect
official	The authority itself	Can produce confirmed alerts
trusted	A secondary source you rely on	Can produce confirmed alerts
unknown	Explicitly ungraded	Capped at weak (documents the decision)
low	A site that generates noise	Can never exceed weak

Adding a rule

In the panel or app: the Sources / Trust screen — enter a domain, pick a tier, save.

Over the API:

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

Rules match a domain and its subdomains, and the most specific rule wins. So example.gov covers notices.example.gov, while a separate rule for blog.example.gov overrides it just for that host.

A worked example

You watch a government exam. Alerts keep arriving unconfirmed even though the official portal reported the news.

1. Open a recent alert and look at its evidence URL — say https://recruit.example.gov/notices/123.
2. Add example.gov as official.
3. Add the coaching sites that keep repeating rumours as low.
4. Re-run the watch. Hits backed by the portal now arrive confirmed; the coaching chatter can no longer rise above unconfirmed.

Alternatives to a registry rule

Tag the source when it is the authority:

- type: rss
  value: "https://example.com/blog/feed.xml"
  trust: official

Pin a search to official domains, which both restricts and grades:

hints:
  officialDomains: ["example.gov"]

Opt the whole watch out of the check, knowingly:

allowUnratedStrong: true

One thing tagging cannot do

An explicit trust on a search source only applies to results from hosts the source itself names. Tagging a broad query as official does not make arbitrary results official — by design.

Reviewing your rules

curl -s https://<your-host>/trust-registry -H "authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"

Returns only your own rules. Delete one with DELETE /trust-registry/<domain>.

Rules apply to every watch you own, so a single well-chosen official rule often fixes several watches at once. Full API: Trust registry API.