Placeholder phone numbers and leftover template text, caught before launch
A site that goes live with “(555) 555-0199” in the contact section, or a street address that reads “123 Main Street”, tells visitors nobody finished it. Anticode looks for this twice: the Critic's placeholder phone number check reports fake numbers while you work, and the design gate refuses to publish a page that still contains placeholder text.
Why fake details survive to launch
Templates and language models fill gaps with whatever looks plausible. Film and television made 555 numbers the standard fake for North America, so they appear in countless templates, and a model asked for a contact section will happily write one. The trouble is that a fake detail looks finished at a glance. You read the headline you care about, skim past the footer, and publish. Then a customer copies the number into their phone.
Leftover template text is worse than an empty space. An empty contact section is obviously unfinished; a convincing fake one is quietly wrong, and it costs trust the moment someone notices.
What the Critic flags as a placeholder number
The placeholder phone number check reads the visible text of the page and fails it if it finds any of these:
- A number in brackets written
(555), the classic North American fake area code. - A number of the form 555-01 followed by two digits, with a hyphen, space or full stop after 555. That's the 555-0100 to 555-0199 range set aside for fiction.
- A run of zeros shaped like a phone number: three zeros, an optional space, then four zeros.
It's one of the Critic's nineteen design checks and shows in the Report tab after each build and edit. On its own it doesn't stop publishing. The broader rule below does.
What the design gate refuses at publish
The design gate runs when you publish and blocks any page whose visible text contains placeholder copy. It reads the words a visitor would see, not the markup. For app builds it reads the code as well, because apps write most of their text from script.
| Kind | What it matches |
|---|---|
| Filler Latin | The standard dummy paragraph typesetters use, which opens with the word Lorem |
| Developer markers | The usual to-do, to-be-decided and fix-me abbreviations as single words, in any letter case |
| Template prompts | Phrases such as “your company name here”, “business logo here”, or a square-bracketed note that starts with “your” |
| Example email addresses | Any address at example.com, example.org or example.net |
| Fake phone numbers | (555), or 555 followed by a separator and a number from 0000 to 0999 |
| Fake street addresses | “123 Main Street”, “123 Fake St”, “123 Any Road” and similar |
When the gate refuses, the publish message names the failed check as “no placeholder text”, and the detail shows what it found, so you can search for it.
Replacing placeholders properly
- Gather the real details first. Phone, email, address, hours and the trading name. The guide on content to gather before building lists the rest.
- Put them in the brief. Include them when you describe the site, so the build has real details to work with.
- Edit in place. Click the text in the visual editor and type the real number, or ask for it in words, giving the real number, and check every place it appears.
- Run the release checklist. It runs every publish check without publishing, so placeholder text shows up before you're trying to go live. See the release checklist.
Limits
- Known patterns only. A made-up number that looks real, such as a plausible local number with the wrong digits, passes both checks. Read your contact details aloud before launch.
- The Critic's phone check is narrower than the gate. It covers only the 555-01 range,
(555)and the zero pattern, and doesn't block on its own. - Legitimate uses can trip it. A page about film trivia that mentions 555 numbers would be refused. Rephrase the sentence if that happens.
- Visible text only, for pages. A placeholder in an image's alt text or a link address isn't read by these checks.
Questions people ask
Why is 555 treated as fake?
Numbers from 555-0100 to 555-0199 are reserved for fictional use in North America, and (555) has become the generic fake area code in templates. Neither belongs on a real site.
Will the placeholder phone number check stop me publishing?
The Critic's check only reports. But the design gate refuses (555) and 555-0 numbers along with other placeholder text, so a page with one can't be published.
Can I use example.com in a guide on my site?
Not in visible text on a published page: the gate treats example.com, .org and .net addresses as placeholders. Use a real address or describe it in words.