Editorial Policy

Who signs off

Alana Hippensteele, Managing Editor, signs off every page on this site, and when a rating turns out to be wrong she is the one who answers for it. The desk is two people. Alana owns editorial standards, the scoring method and corrections. Aristotelis Kourtelis, Licensing and Player Protection Analyst, owns licence checks, KYC, self-exclusion, the legal section and responsible gambling. One writes a page, the other checks it. Both names and both dates sit at the top of whatever you are reading, including this.

Never the same person twice on one page

The author and the fact-checker are different named people. Always, without an exception for a quiet week or a long queue.

The checker works from the source material rather than from the draft: opening the register entry, the terms document and the cashier page, then comparing what they say against what the sentence claims, instead of reading the sentence and deciding whether it sounds right. Nobody marks their own homework. On a two person desk that is impossible to fudge, because the byline shows which of the two did which job.

What a claim needs before it runs

Every factual sentence needs a source a reader could open independently. In practice that resolves to five rules.

• A licence claim needs a register entry. Number, licensee, status, and whether the domain the reader is sent to is listed. A footer badge is a claim, not evidence.
• A bonus figure needs its terms in the same breath. Multiplier, what it applies to, maximum bet while the bonus is live, weighting, expiry, and any cap on winnings, with the clause identified where it sits away from the offer page.
• A payout figure needs attribution. It is the operator’s published number, described as the operator’s number, or the review says no processing time is published.
• A support claim needs its status attached. The advertised channels, and the words not tested wherever that is the case.
• Anything with a number needs the date it was read. Terms are dated documents and a figure without a date is a figure with no scope.

What gets sent back

A page that fails goes back to whoever wrote it. It does not go through with a hedge bolted on to cover the gap. Six things send a draft back on sight.

A licence described as verified when the register returned nothing. A headline bonus quoted with no wagering basis. A payout window written as fact rather than as the operator’s claim. A game total with no counting date. A page with no named checker, or a check date that has drifted from the last time anyone looked. And the quiet one: a sentence that would survive unchanged on any casino site in any market, which carries no information and takes space a threshold or a clause number should have.

Where the two of us disagree about a claim, the page waits.

The wall between commercial and editorial

This site is funded by affiliate commission, and the mechanics are set out on how we make money. The arrangement changes nothing about a score, and the process is built so that claim can be checked rather than merely asserted.

Commission rates are not part of a brief. Neither the writer nor the checker receives the rate as an input, because a number you have not been told cannot influence a score you are setting. No partner sees a score before publication. None can argue one down afterwards; a complaint about a rating goes through corrections, which fixes errors of fact and does not reopen judgements. An operator that pays nothing can outrank one that pays well, and the current table does exactly that.

The published weights are the audit. An overall score is the weighted mean of six section scores, so anyone can take those six numbers off a review page and check that the published figure comes out. A score adjusted to favour a partner would leave a mismatch a reader could find in a minute.

When a page gets looked at again

Revisits are queued rather than left to whoever happens to notice. Four things put a page in the queue: a change to the register entry behind a licence, a dated update to an operator’s terms or cashier pages, a report from a reader or from the operator itself, and plain age on the stated check date.

The six reviews where a licence could not be evidenced sit at the front of that queue. That finding is the one most likely to move, in either direction, and it carries the heaviest weight in the score. Terms move constantly too, which is why each review states the date its terms were read rather than implying a figure is permanent. Anything a revisit changes is logged on the page itself.