How the 2026 edition is compiled
A roundup is only as good as the rule it was written under. This page states the rule: where each kind of statement on this site comes from, what is deliberately left out, how the commercial arrangement shapes the scope of coverage, and how to get something corrected.
The order of precedence for sources
Every sentence on this site falls into one of four categories, and each category has one permitted source. Where a statement cannot be supported from its permitted source, it is not written.
| Kind of statement | Permitted source | If the source is silent |
|---|---|---|
| A fact about a named product | That vendor's own published documentation | The page records that the point is not stated |
| A legal right, obligation or reporting route in Australia | The Australian government body responsible for it, linked | The point is written as general guidance, or dropped |
| A general technical description | Established, non-contested description of how the technology works | Written with its uncertainty stated |
| A statement about this site or its publisher | The publisher's own knowledge | Not applicable |
The rule has a visible consequence, which is that the product table in the 2026 roundup has more blanks than a typical affiliate page. Those blanks are the method working, not the method failing.
What is excluded, and why
Published here
- Descriptions of how the technology works
- Vendor-stated product facts, attributed as such
- Comparison criteria, with the reasoning behind each
- Australian consumer rights and reporting routes, linked to source
- Dated statements about when each page was last reviewed
Not published here
- Detection scores, benchmark figures, performance measurements
- Prices, discounts or promotional claims
- Star ratings, "best of" rankings or awards
- Testimonials, user reviews or quoted experiences
- Statistics without a linked primary source
Each exclusion has the same justification. This publisher does not run a testing laboratory, so a detection figure here would either be copied without verification or invented. Prices in this category change by promotion, term length and region often enough that a number written in September is unreliable by March. Ratings imply a measurement, and there is none. Testimonials cannot be verified, so no reader will find one on this site — not an anonymous one, not a named one, not a paraphrased one.
On the absence of scores
Readers sometimes ask why there is no ranked table. A ranking needs a measurement and a weighting, and publishing one without both is a design decision dressed as a finding. Independent testing organisations do run controlled comparisons of detection engines, and reading their methodology alongside their results is a better use of a buyer's time than any list on a site like this one.
How the commercial arrangement affects coverage
Lumos Network earns money one way: an affiliate commission on subscriptions bought through the link to Surfshark Antivirus. That fact affects this site in a specific and limited way, and being precise about which way is the point of this section.
It does not affect the content of any description. Nothing here was written, edited, approved or seen in advance by a vendor. There is no agreement to describe any product favourably, and no commission rate that would change a sentence.
It does affect scope. Detailed, maintained coverage of a product costs time, and a publisher of this size directs that time towards the products it has a relationship with. The result is a roundup covering one product rather than twelve. A site claiming to have surveyed the whole market while linking to one vendor would be making a claim it could not defend; this one makes the narrower claim, which is the true one.
It also affects what you should do with the site. Treat it as a way to understand the category and to ask better questions, and treat the vendor's own documentation as the authority on the vendor's own product. The full terms of the arrangement are on the affiliate disclosure page.
The review cycle
- Annually, in SeptemberA full pass over every page: claims rechecked against their sources, dead links removed, dates updated, and the edition label advanced.
- On notificationA correction raised by a reader, a vendor or a regulator is checked and, if it stands, applied as soon as it is confirmed, with the page's review date updated.
- On material changeIf a vendor changes something this site states about its product, the statement is updated out of cycle rather than left until the next September.
- NeverA page is not quietly rewritten to remove a statement that turned out to be wrong. Where a correction changes the substance of a page, the change is described on the page.
Every page carries a "last reviewed" date in its footer, and dated pages carry a compilation date near the top. A date is a claim about currency, and an undated page in this category is worth very little.
Language, spelling and measurement
The site is written in Australian English for readers in Australia: organisation, licence, personalise, authorised, colour. Dates appear in full, as "21 September 2026", because numeric formats are read differently in different countries and this is a category where a date matters. Where money is mentioned at all it is Australian dollars, although no prices appear on this site.
Why an annual edition rather than a rolling one
Most affiliate sites in this category present themselves as permanently current: a page headed with the present year, quietly edited whenever a link changes, with no record of when anything on it was last checked. That format hides its own age, and age is the main thing wrong with security advice found online.
An edition behaves differently. It is compiled at a stated time, it carries that time on its face, and it is replaced rather than silently amended. A reader arriving in mid-2027 can see that the material was assembled in September 2026 and weigh it accordingly, which is a judgement the reader is entitled to make. The cost of the format is that some detail ages between editions; the compensation is that the reader can see exactly how much time has passed.
The same reasoning governs the review dates in the footer of every page, including the legal pages. A privacy policy with no effective date, or a page with no review date, asks the reader to assume currency rather than demonstrating it.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, this publisher wants to know. Email info@lumosnetwork.online with the page address and the statement at issue. A correction backed by a source gets applied; a request to remove an accurate statement does not. There is no form to fill in, because this site collects nothing and has nowhere to put it.
Vendors are welcome to use the same address, and a vendor correcting a fact about its own product is treated as the authoritative source for that fact.
What would change this method
Two things would. If this publisher began testing products, the results and the test conditions would be published together, and this page would describe the test setup before any score appeared. If coverage widened to products without a commercial relationship, that would be stated here and the disclosure pages would be rewritten to match. Until one of those happens, the method above is the whole of it.