How to read HelloStamped
Everything here says where it came from. That is the whole idea, and it only works if you know what the words mean — so here they are, along with where software wrote something and where a person did.
The three labels
Every post, answer and section of a guide carries exactly one of these. They are never blended into one block — the database refuses a post that tries.
Quotes or summarises a government source — USCIS, the State Department, the Department of Labor, the IRS, the SSA — or an official document. Every claim links to the source it came from and says when it was last checked. This is the rule as written. It is still not advice about your case.
Written by another immigrant, from their own experience. What happened to one person at one office on one day is real and useful, and it is not a rule. Officers differ, service centres differ, and the same paperwork goes differently for two people in the same week. Read it as evidence, not as a promise.
Written by somebody speaking as a professional — an immigration attorney, a CPA. Today this label is self-declared: the person selected it, and HelloStamped has not checked their licence. Treat it as a stranger’s professional opinion rather than as a credential, and if it matters to your case, ask them who they are. Verifying this label is the next thing being built.
Two more you will see, and they are not sources of information at all — they mark who paid. Sponsored, Advertisement, Partner offer and Affiliate mean a company paid HelloStamped to show it to you. A referral linkon somebody’s profile pays that member, not us. None of it ever appears on a guide, in the assistant, or in search results.
Advertisers reach HelloStamped through the Contact page, and everything sponsored is labelled as sponsored.
Where AI is used, and where it is not
The guides are written from the government documents they cite, and read by a person before they are published. Nothing is written from memory: whoever drafts a guide sees only the source document, and a claim that cannot be attributed to it does not survive review.
Your daily brief is assembled by software — it picks which cards concern somebody in your situation and quotes them. It does not compose new claims about immigration.
The assistant is AI, and it may only use passages retrieved from published guides. If those passages do not answer you, it says so and stops. It is built to refuse rather than to guess, because a plausible wrong deadline is worse than no answer.
Search ranks existing guides. The answer at the top of a search page is quoted from one of them, word for word — nothing is written for it.
Posts and answers are written by people. No AI writes in the community, and there are no invented members here — every account is a real person who signed up. An automated check does read new posts looking for scams and spam, and it can hide a post until a human decides, but it never removes anything.
Nothing you told us about your visa situation is ever sent to an AI provider. It is encrypted, kept apart from everything else, and used only to decide which cards belong in your brief. The full detail is on the privacy page.
What gets checked
Dates. Fees, visa bulletin dates and processing times go stale, so they carry the day they were last verified and are withheld from answers after thirty days rather than quoted as current. A search that leaves results out for this reason says so.
Deals. Every one is read by an administrator before it appears, and no member earns anything when you use one.
Referral offers. Only members who have earned it can add one, an administrator checks each, and the link must sit on the company’s own domain — no shorteners, nothing that hides where it goes.
Reputation is not a credential. Levels like Trusted Contributor describe how much somebody has helped here. They say nothing about qualifications, and they are deliberately not shown next to answers, so that nobody’s standing makes their guess look like a fact.
What this is not
HelloStamped is not a law firm and does not represent you. Nothing here is legal advice about your individual case. When a decision affects your status, check it against the source we link to, or take it to a licensed attorney.
We would rather tell you a rule and show you the page it came from than tell you what to do. That is a real limit, not modesty.