JenPlateau said:

Vendor reputation tracking for vendor vetting: I maintain a personal spreadsheet with every order I've placed — date, vendor, batch number, Janoshik…

Can confirm. Same sequence, different timescale. The detail I would add is minor and it is already implied above.

TrialTracker_MD said:

The boring version of this is the one that works, and the boring version is: measure a baseline, change one variable, wait, measure again under the…

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. The version of this that has an answer is narrower than the version being asked. Narrow it and it becomes tractable; leave it broad and the thread will produce nine confident and incompatible replies.

One concrete data point for the thread. If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way. Most of the apparent contradictions in these threads dissolve at that step.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

What a vetting checklist should actually contain, as opposed to a list of things that are easy to fake?

Moderator note: good thread. Keeping it here rather than moving it, because the question is general enough to be useful. Tagging this one for the weekly digest.