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ADR 0013: Testimonial Governance Guardrails

Status

Accepted (2026-02-08)

Context

Stakeholder testimonials are high-trust content. Without explicit validation rules, accidental mispublication (multiple quotes, missing consent trail, incomplete attribution) can undermine professional credibility.

Decision

Apply fail-closed testimonial governance in the frontend content layer:

  1. Allow at most one published: true testimonial.
  2. Require publishedAt and approvalReference for published testimonials.
  3. Require displayName when attribution is named.
  4. Prevent rendering unpublished testimonials.
  5. If dataset validation fails, render no testimonial.

Consequences

Positive

  • Prevents accidental over-publication.
  • Enforces a lightweight consent audit trail for published quotes.
  • Keeps homepage behavior deterministic and conservative.

Tradeoff

  • Slightly stricter editorial workflow when adding new testimonials.

Follow-Up

  1. Keep approvalReference linked to interview/consent notes.
  2. Revisit schema if multiple published testimonials are intentionally introduced in future.