Our Editorial Process & Methodology
Releasebot is an aggregator of official release note contents from software vendors.
Our mission is to exhaustively catalog every release note on the planet into a uniform structure, allowing our users to effortlessly follow the products they care about.
By combining multiple sources of release notes into a single feed and augmenting the release note contents, Releasebot provides a level of detail and information completeness that is not available even from a software publisher's own sources.
Sourcing
Every release note source we curate is manually verified before it enters into our pipeline.
Users can submit release note sources to the Releasebot team, but these sources do not enter our corpus before a human has assessed the source and configured it for curation.
Inclusion for criteria:
- Software only, not news about software
- Original sources only, no news sources or third parties
- Sites that prevent our systems from accessing them (logins, etc) will not be added
Editorial decisions
The Releasebot team makes a number of key editorial decisions:
- Which vendors and products enter our catalog
- The hierarchy of vendor and product entries within our catalog
- The relationship between release note sources, products, and vendors in our catalog
- The transformation that is applied to release note sources that do not exactly match our schema
- The information to emphasize in any release's summary
Content augmentation and adjustments
The Releasebot team makes its best effort to preserve and reproduce release note contents in their original form. However, we also may augment the content in some useful ways:
- Reformatting unstructured changelog entries into our schema
- Adding an automatically-generated "quick read" summary of the changelog. This summary enhances the changelog-scanning experience for our readers and is a useful artifact for our various notification formats.
- Tagging release notes with automatically-generated tags
Update cadence and freshness
Releasebot updates every feed in its catalog at least daily. Our most popular vendors and products may receive more frequent updates.
Error correction and manual release review
Releasebot has a manual review process to ensure stale or broken sources are addressed in a timely manner. Users can report issues with any given source here.
Releasebot also has a manual review process that allows us to validate the automated aspects of our release curation pipeline. Every release is eligible for a manual review, which helps us catch issues quickly and modify release notes contents or metadata if required.
Use of AI
The Releasebot team uses AI to assist with the following processes:
- Curating candidate release note sources
- Validating candidate release note sources
- Checking submitted release note sources
- Transforming release note sources to match our schema
- Formatting, summarizing, and tagging curated release notes
AI output is grounded entirely in the original source material. We do not use AI to fabricate release content, add details that aren't in the source, or generate information about unannounced changes.
About the project
Releasebot launched in 2025 as an independent, bootstrapped project. The catalog currently tracks hundreds of vendors across thousands release note sources, with all source verification, schema decisions, and editorial review conducted by the Releasebot Editorial team. Thousands of people have signed up to receive alerts when the products they follow post new updates.