How grading figures are handled

Grading companies publish population reports: how many copies of a card they have graded at each grade tier. CLCT captures those published reports — a report page or a report export, pinned by content hash at capture time — and links each report’s rows to the permanent canonical record they describe. What renders publicly is exactly what the grader published: the grader’s own tier labels, the grader’s own figures, and the grader’s own stated total where it supplied one.

Two graders describing one card are two independent observations of one underlying population of physical copies. Their figures are shown separately, attributed separately, and never added together — a “combined population” would be a claim no grader made and no arithmetic can justify, because the same physical copy can appear in both graders’ counts or in neither.

When a grader publishes a zero for a tier, CLCT shows the zero: the grader said “none at this grade”. When a grader publishes nothing for a tier, CLCT says “not reported”: the grader said nothing, and inventing a zero would turn silence into a claim. The two render differently on every surface, always.

Every figure carries the date its report was observed — the operator-stated capture date, in UTC. That is not necessarily the day the grader first published the figures, and it is deliberately not the timestamp of CLCT’s own processing: when CLCT copied a number is a fact about CLCT, not about the card. A figure without its grader and its observation date is not publishable here at all.

A grader’s report row names a card in the grader’s own words. Linking that row to a canonical CLCT record — a specific card, and where the grader distinguishes printings, a specific variant — is a reviewed human decision recorded in an append-only ledger. Only a live, approved link publishes; rows whose identity cannot be established on the evidence are retained unlinked and publish nothing. The grader’s own wording for the graded subject is preserved and shown whenever two of a grader’s rows land on one record.

The same published report can be captured more than once. Captures that are semantically identical — same grader, same report, same observation day, same figures — collapse into one displayed reading, chosen deterministically. The evidence ledger is append-only: consolidation marks a duplicate as retired and points at the surviving reading; nothing is deleted, and the full capture history remains auditable.

When two captures of one report on one day disagree, neither number is silently chosen. The surfaces show the last uncontested reading, marked as carrying a conflicting capture under review — or, when no uncontested reading exists, an explicit under-review notice instead of a table. Earlier dated readings of a report are retained and counted, not displayed: two dates’ figures side by side would read as two current claims.

A link found to be wrong is superseded by a new reviewed decision — the ledger records both, and the public surfaces follow the live one. Anyone can flag a suspected error; the participation page explains how. Corrections flow through the same review that created the links; there is no path that edits published figures directly.

A population figure says a grader graded copies. It does not authenticate any particular copy, does not measure rarity or value, carries no investment meaning, and is not a census: coverage here is what CLCT has captured and reviewed, not everything that exists. CLCT is independent of the grading companies whose published reports it links; naming a grader attributes a figure and implies nothing else. The collectible index remains the record of what exists, graded or not.

Where a report’s durable identity carries the grader’s own public URL, the surfaces link it, so a figure can be checked at its source. Reports captured from owner-supplied exports carry their evidence in CLCT’s retained records — hashed at capture — instead of a public link. Internal identifiers, reviewer identities and workflow records appear on no public surface.