Two kinds of "done"
When a fan clears a gate step, there are really two things that could have happened. Either we confirmed the action against the platform’s own API, or the fan clicked through and told us they did it. Those are not the same, and pretending they are is how gate tools quietly lie to you.
We call the first one hard verification and the second one soft. A hard check is an OAuth connection or a signed webhook — the platform itself tells us the follow, the join or the save actually happened. A soft check is an attestation: the fan clicked out to do the thing, came back, and confirmed it.
Why we can’t always do the hard version
It would be lovely if every platform let us read back every action. They do not. Some APIs will confirm a save but not a follow. Some will not confirm anything at all without scopes the fan should not have to grant just to download a track. Where the platform’s API genuinely cannot confirm an action, we are honest that the best we have is a click-through.
The wrong move — and the common one — is to record a soft attestation as if it were a verified action. That inflates your numbers and corrupts your data: you think you have a list of confirmed followers when really you have a list of people who clicked a button. We will not do that.
How GateCrate draws the line
Every gate-step module declares its own confidence: hard or soft. The fan-facing UI reflects it plainly — a soft step reads as a best-effort click-through, never as a proven action. And in your data, a soft attestation is recorded with the correct method and status. It never gets written down as a verified completion. The distinction survives all the way into the CSV you export.
The reason is simple. The whole point of GateCrate is that the list you own is real. A list padded with fake-verified actions is worth less than a smaller list you can trust completely. We would rather show you an honest number than a flattering one.
So when you see a step marked as verified in your CRM, it means the platform confirmed it. When you see an attestation, it means the fan told us. You always know which is which — because the one thing we will never do is fake a check.