How the feed is ordered: pinned critical + decisions-first curation

What this article covers

The HQ feed blends six sources into one stream: network signals, broadcasts you sent, decision plan activity, consent responses, franchisee plan adoptions, and restoration industry and vendor news. That overview article covers what each card looks like. This article covers the one question leaders ask most: why is this card above that one? The stream is built from three ordering rules, applied in a strict order of precedence, and this article walks through each one, in the order it fires.

1. Critical-severity cards are pinned to the top, no matter how old they are.
2. Below critical, your chosen focus areas weight network signals up as a tiebreaker.
3. The rest of the stream is arranged decisions-first, with industry and vendor content woven in one card at a time rather than left to bunch up.

Nothing here hides a card. Every rule below reorders the stream; none of them removes a card from it (content format, topic, and volume preferences do filter content, and that is covered in the feed overview and in Settings, not here).

Rule 1: Critical cards are pinned, regardless of age

Every network signal your network's own signal detection writes carries a severity: critical, warning, or info. Whenever at least one critical-severity signal is in your feed, it sits at the very top of the stream, above everything else, including cards that are more recent. A critical compliance gap detected ten days ago still opens the feed ahead of a broadcast you sent an hour ago, because a high-impact network problem should never get buried under routine traffic.

In practice, only network signal cards ever reach critical severity. Broadcasts, decision plan activity, consent responses, and franchisee adoption events are informational by nature, so they land as warning or info at most and never compete for the pinned row. The pinned row at the top of your feed, when one exists, is always built from your network's own signal detection, the same source covered in Network signal cards.

Rule 2: Focus areas weight network signals below the critical row

Once the pinned critical row is out of the way, the next ordering signal is your focus areas, a preference you set once and can change any time. In HQ Settings, under Account, the "Areas that matter most to you" control lets you turn on or off any of six areas, shown as toggleable pills:

• Compliance & risk
• Adoption & operations
• Margin & cash
• People & labor
• Vendors & equipment
• Reputation

Every area starts turned on, so a leader who never opens this control gets a neutral feed: no area is weighted above another. Turning an area off does not hide the signals in it; it simply stops giving them the ordering boost the remaining areas still get. The panel says this directly: "We weight these up in your network feed. Nothing is ever hidden."

This weighting applies to network signal cards only. It does not touch broadcasts, decision plan activity, consent responses, franchisee adoptions, or industry and vendor content: those always sort on recency alone at this stage. A margin-drift signal in a focus area you have turned on will out-rank a same-age signal in an area you left off, but it will not out-rank a broadcast or a plan-outcome card that happens to be newer, since those never carry a focus weight to begin with.

Put together, the ordering below the critical row is: focus-weighted network signals first, then everything else by recency, newest first.

Rule 3: Decisions-first curation, with content sprinkled in

The final rule governs how your network's own activity (what this article calls the decision-and-activity stream: signals, broadcasts, plan activity, consent responses, and adoptions) is woven together with the industry and vendor news stream, so a run of articles never crowds out what your network is actually doing.

The stream leads with your network's activity, warning-severity cards ahead of info-severity ones within that stream, following the order Rules 1 and 2 already established. Content, articles, videos, podcasts, events, and vendor news, rides along, but only ever as a sprinkle: one content card is woven in after every three activity cards, and never ahead of the first three. If your network's activity runs out before the content does, whatever content is left over trails at the very end, so the feed never opens on a wall of news before it has shown you what your network is doing.

What fills that one content slot, in order:

1. A featured Verinode publication, if one is live, a research paper or an editorial deep-dive our own team has flagged. It takes the very first content slot, right after the opening run of activity cards, and holds that spot until you open it or it ages out.
2. Everything else in your content stream, industry articles, videos, podcasts, events, and vendor news (product launches, recalls, and the like), ordered by recency, with two small adjustments:

- A C&R Magazine article always sorts ahead of a Cleanfax article of similar age. Every other source keeps the recency order it arrived in. - If no video would otherwise make the cut, the freshest available video is pulled forward, since videos publish far less often than articles and would almost never surface on recency alone. - Verinode-authored content (beyond the one featured publication) is capped at two cards total, so external industry news always has room.

1. At most one marketing poster, if one exists, at the very tail of the content stream, an occasional brand moment rather than a second news feed.

How much content rides along at all is capped by your content-volume setting (also in Settings, Account: "News and learning in your feed"). The default, "Just the essentials," runs the content pool at half its normal size; "Keep me current" runs it at full size. Either way, this cap only limits how much content is available to sprinkle in; it never changes how the activity stream itself is ordered.

Completed decision-plan rollouts (the "Outcome: [plan name]" cards) are the one exception to the weave: they run after the full decision-and-activity-plus-content stream, as a small celebratory tail once the working queue is shown.

How the three rules combine: a worked example

Say your network has one critical compliance gap open (nine days old), four warning-severity signals in the Margin & cash area (which you have turned on as a focus), a broadcast you sent yesterday, a decision-plan outcome that completed this morning, and a backlog of industry articles and one vendor product-launch card.

1. The critical compliance gap opens the feed, alone, at the very top. It is nine days old and none of the newer cards can pass it.
2. Next comes the decision-and-activity stream. The four margin signals sort ahead of same-age items outside your focus areas, and, within severity, warning-level cards (the margin signals) sort ahead of info-level ones (the broadcast).
3. After the first three activity cards (the first three margin signals, say), one content card is woven in, the featured Verinode publication if one is live, otherwise the next card in the content pool.
4. The fourth margin signal and the broadcast follow, then another content card is sprinkled in, and so on until the activity stream runs out.
5. The completed plan's "Outcome" card lands after the full activity-plus-content weave, since completed plans are shown once the working queue has surfaced.
6. Any content left in the pool once activity runs dry, additional articles, the vendor product-launch card, trails at the very end.

Why the ordering is built this way

A network leader's feed exists to answer one question first: what does my network need me to see today? Critical pinning guarantees a genuine problem never gets outrun by a fresher, lower-stakes card. Focus-area weighting lets you tell Verinode which business areas matter most to you, without ever making Verinode decide that an area you did not pick simply does not exist in your feed. Decisions-first curation keeps the feed reading as a working stream of your network's own activity rather than a news reader that happens to have some decisions mixed in, while still surfacing the industry content your team relies on, on a predictable cadence instead of all at once or not at all.

Related reading

• The HQ feed: your network's home screen: the full tour, including the briefing card, filters, sources, and privacy boundary.
• Network signal cards: the source behind every critical and focus-weighted card.
• Consent response cards: how franchisee consent responses appear in the activity stream.
• Franchisee adoption events: how individual plan adoptions appear in the activity stream.
• HQ programs: the decision plans behind activation and outcome cards.
• Broadcasting to your network: sending the messages that come back as broadcast cards.
• HQ overview: how the feed fits into the rest of HQ's navigation.