I look for a stated best practices method/approach to be applied in several other people's tanks in order to vet the information for accuracy vs bias
for example
if someone says, do X and your corals will grow astoundingly fast, and they link their own system as the proof, I rate that low on validity. if instead they post a thread of 100 other people's reefs doing X and there's a high degree of significant growth rates, for other people, that's a high validity claim
same for quarantine/disease methods. if someone says 'I don't quarantine' and they post their tank as the best practices example, yet the disease forum shows what happens when res publica stops quarantining, that strikes me as an unvetted claim for the masses to consider.
or best sandbed practices for sure...someone with a 25 year untouched deep sandbed should easily, easily be able to garner the same results for others by describing their method and 100+ other people in an actual focus study should be able to get years and years with no trouble. we all know sandbeds don't work that way: they're highly variable. what it takes to streamline 100+ other people's tanks for sandbed control is very different than the Jaubert, Berlin or any common method from the 90s.
anytime someone is using their own tank as a proof be weary/hard to convince
but anytime someone is showing you a link with 100 other reefs running a best claims practice, and winning, consider that claim pretty strong.
it's not that people's claims about what works best for them are false
it's that the conveying the nuances of those best methods to others is very very very hard.
look for the pattern: are best practices claimants posting their own tank testimony + pics, or pics from other people's tanks and their testimony> what I see in the claims field is nearly 99% always someone's own tank at home, where they control all variables on disclosure.
having to collate the stated outcomes from 100 other people makes it very hard to control what's disclosed as a best practice.
