Affiliate & Sponsorship Disclosure Policy
How LanternRack funds our container testing pipeline and how affiliate links, hardware review units, and sponsored deployments are labeled.
Running an automated + human-verified container pipeline, GPU TTS synthesis, and dedicated server testbeds takes time and hardware. To keep LanternRack guides and docker-compose.yml recipes free and unlocked from hard paywalls, we occasionally accept sponsorships or use affiliate links.
This page explains our strict transparency rules in compliance with the Competition Bureau of Canada (Deceptive Marketing Practices Provisions), Ad Standards Canada Influencer Marketing Steering Committee Disclosures, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) 16 CFR Part 255 Guides.
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1. Clear & Upfront Labeling
Whenever a guide or video contains a material connection (paid sponsorship, affiliate commission link, or free hardware/cloud credit):
- Above-the-Fold Disclosure Banner: Our Hugo theme automatically renders a high-visibility Creator Transparency Disclosure banner at the very top of the article (
params.sponsored: trueorparams.affiliate: true) *before* you click any link or read the tutorial. - In-Video & Platform Labels: Sponsored vertical shorts include an audible/visual disclosure in the first seconds of the video, platform-native
Paid Promotiontoggles on YouTube/TikTok/Instagram, and#ad/#sponsoredin the first line of the caption. - HTML Link Attributes: All paid or affiliate outbound links include
rel="sponsored noopener"in the rendered HTML.
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2. What Can (and Cannot) Be Bought
| Allowed for Sponsors | Never For Sale |
|---|---|
| Prioritizing an open-source repo or developer tool in our testing schedule | Altering terminal outputs, boot times, or RAM/CPU measurements |
A clearly labeled [Sponsor] callout slot in the Weekly Rack Digest | Hiding broken features, mandatory cloud telemetry, or licensing gotchas |
| Affiliate links on homelab hardware we actually run in our rack | Writing a positive "recommended" verdict in a head-to-head comparison |
If a sponsored project fails to deploy cleanly in our isolated testbed, we report the failure directly to the sponsor and decline to publish until the upstream container works as documented.