When we gave homeowners a view of their own rating, we bounded it to the last ninety days. The trade-facing view, built earlier, was unbounded: a tradesperson deciding whether to take your job saw everything, back to the beginning.
Nobody designed that. One view got a window because the person building it thought a window was fair, and the other never got one because nobody went back. It is the ordinary way two halves of one idea drift apart.
Why it mattered more than it looked
The whole argument for showing you your own rating is that you should be able to see what is being said about you. That argument collapses if the other side is acting on something outside your view. A tradesperson could weigh a rating from eight months ago that you could not find, could not understand and therefore could not contest.
At that point we are not being transparent. We are showing you a partial extract and calling it your record.
Both views now use the same ninety days, and the number lives in one place so they cannot drift apart again. It also matches the window the rest of the platform already used for a tradesperson's own reliability, so no part of Tradelynx weighs one person's history over a different horizon than another's.
The argument against, which is a real one
Somebody walking into a stranger's house has a legitimate interest in knowing about an aggressive customer from ten months ago. A ninety-day window throws that away. That is not a quibble, it is a safety point.
Our answer is that a durable safety signal is a different mechanism wearing a reputation average's clothes. If one is wanted it should be built deliberately, with its own retention period and its own justification, rather than arriving as a side effect of an average nobody remembered to bound. Smuggled in that way it would be neither well designed as safety nor defensible as reputation, and nobody could say which of the two it was meant to be.
We wrote that reasoning into the code next to the number, so the next person to consider widening the window finds the decision instead of re-deriving it.