Editorial policy

A figure is only stored here with three things attached: the page it was read from, what kind of source that page is, and the date somebody read it. If any of the three is missing, the figure is not stored, and a figure that is not stored cannot be printed.

We rank sources, and the ranking decides disagreements. The strongest is the game’s own information screen inside a casino, because that is the configuration actually being played. Then the studio’s own page, then a testing laboratory’s report, then a regulator’s register, then an operator’s own terms. Where a studio and an aggregator disagree, the studio wins and we record where the number came from.

We do not accept a figure whose only source is another affiliate site. Not as a fallback, not with a caveat. A number restated by a site like ours is evidence about that site, not about the game — and the practice of quoting each other is how the same wrong return percentage ends up on forty pages. This rule costs us numbers on most pages and it is the one we are least willing to bend.

One consequence is visible everywhere: a game’s return is stored as a set rather than a single number, because studios build several versions of the same game and the casino chooses which one it runs. One title in our own database ships in five versions twelve percentage points apart. Printing one number for it would be wrong for at least four readers in five, and we would not be able to say which four.

Most of what a reader wants to know is not published by anybody. That is the single most important finding behind this site, and it produces three separate statements that we keep separate:

• Not published. We looked, and the studio or the casino does not publish it. This is a fact about them and it is often the most useful thing on the page.
• Not checked yet. We have not looked. This is a fact about us, it is our backlog, and it is never dressed up as the sentence above it.
• Source refused. A number exists, and the only place it exists is a source we do not accept. We would rather show you this than launder it.

A missing number is never a zero, never a dash and never quietly omitted. Where a whole block of a page has nothing behind it, the block is listed at the bottom of that page in one line each, so you can see the shape of what is missing rather than being left with a page that looks complete.

A game or casino page starts as a data record: sourced figures, no opinion, no score. It becomes a review only when somebody has worked through the whole of it — what the studio publishes, what it does not, how the game behaves, and at least two real criticisms, because a review with nothing bad in it is an advertisement.

At the time of writing, none of the records on this site has been reviewed. Every game and casino page is a data record, which is why none of them carries a rating and why our ranked lists are ordered by hand with the reason printed beside each entry. When scores arrive, the weights that produce them will be published before the first score is, and every score will be recomputable from the inputs listed under it.

Nothing on this site is labelled hot, trending, popular, or editor’s choice. Those labels appeared throughout the sites we studied with no stated basis anywhere, and the software here refuses to render them.

This site is built by an artificial intelligence system working under the direction of its owner, and that includes the writing. The research that this site is founded on, the structure of its database, the software that renders these pages and the words you are reading were all produced that way. We are telling you this in the first sentence rather than in a footnote, because a page about honesty that buries this is not one.

What that does and does not mean, precisely:

• No figure is generated. Every number on this site was read from a named page on a stated date and stored before any sentence was written around it. Where an article needed a figure the database did not hold, the figure was sourced and stored — the sentence was not written from memory. A language model is capable of producing a plausible return percentage, and a plausible return percentage is the most dangerous object this site could contain.
• The writing is checked against the database, not against itself. Figures quoted inside our articles are read from the same records the game’s own page reads, at the moment the page is built, so an article and the page it links to cannot disagree.
• A human owns the decisions. Which markets we publish to, what the site is for, what gets built and what gets refused are the owner’s calls, not the system’s.
• No image on this site is presented as a photograph of something real. Artwork here is generated and is used as illustration only. A screenshot of a game or a casino, if we ever publish one, will carry the date it was taken.

The honest risk is worth naming too. A system like this is good at producing text that sounds sourced. The defence is not that it tries hard — it is that the software will not render a figure that has no stored source and date behind it, so a confident sentence with nothing under it fails to build rather than being published.

A byline is a promise that a specific person is answerable for a page. There is not yet a person here whose name would mean anything to you, so our articles carry no author name at all rather than a plausible one.

That is a real weakness and we are not going to describe it as a feature. The two largest slot sites in the world publish reviews with no byline and no date, and being unbylined puts us in their company on that one axis. What we can offer instead is everything else on this page: the sources, the dates, the refusals, and a correction record you can read.

When named people do write here, their names and roles will appear on the pages they are responsible for, and the software already refuses to publish an article credited to somebody who is not actually working here.

Some links to casinos on this site earn us a commission if you sign up and play. Where that is true, it is said next to the link itself, on the page, not only in a paragraph in the footer.

No position in any ranking on this site can be bought. Wherever anything is ordered, the key it is ordered on is printed beside it, and commission is never that key. A casino cannot pay to be listed, to be listed higher, to have a criticism removed, or to have a figure softened.

There are no countdown timers, no invented scarcity, no fake “last claimed 2 minutes ago” notices, and no interstitials that have to be dismissed before you can read a page. These are common on the sites we studied and they are all forms of the same thing. The list below is the whole of it.

Everything above is about what we publish. This is about what we do to you while you read it, which is a different question and the one the industry gets worst.

Each promise below is enforced rather than intended. The words you are reading and the list our build software refuses to compile are the same list: the page is generated from it, and a separate check confirms both that nothing in the source matches any of the forbidden patterns and that this section really did render them. A promise nobody measures is a slogan, and this site’s own history includes a footer that spent a whole release telling every reader a page was unbuilt after it had been built.

• No countdown timer, anywhere, and no offer that expires while you read.

  What we found instead, on the sites we studied: A timer next to a welcome bonus that resets when the page is reloaded, so the deadline it shows is not a deadline.

• No invented scarcity — no spots left, no limited allocation, no last chance.

  What we found instead, on the sites we studied: A bonus described as limited on a page that has served the same bonus for two years.

• No “X players viewing this now”, no “last claimed 2 minutes ago”, and no other invented activity.

  What we found instead, on the sites we studied: A live viewer count that increments on a timer regardless of how many people are on the page.

• Nothing opens over the page, and nothing has to be dismissed before you can read it.

  What we found instead, on the sites we studied: An age gate, a newsletter modal and a bonus interstitial in sequence before the first paragraph.

• No game is ever marked hot, due, cold or lucky. A machine has no memory of what it just paid.

  What we found instead, on the sites we studied: A “hot right now” rail whose ordering is not published, on sites that also explain what a random number generator is.

• No editor’s choice, no best pick and no award, unless the thing behind it is published and you can recompute it.

  What we found instead, on the sites we studied: Twenty-five sites studied; none published the rubric behind a single rating or badge.

One thing on this list is worth naming separately, because it is the one most sites would call a safety feature. We do not put an age gate or any other panel in front of a page. A box that anybody can click through is not a check, and putting one in front of a page about gambling harm is theatre performed at the expense of the person who most needed to read it. What we do instead is on the responsible play page, it is reachable from every page on the site, and nothing has to be dismissed to get to it.

Every country this site knows about carries a flag deciding whether we may publish anything aimed at it at all. Where that flag is off, nothing about that market renders anywhere on the site: no page, no list entry, no link, no mention in a menu. The research still exists in our database; it simply does not reach a reader.

That is not a content policy applied by hand, it is how the software is built, which means it cannot be forgotten on one page. Several countries in this region prohibit the promotion of online gambling, and promotion is what a site like this does. We would rather be absent from a market than be a carefully worded presence in it.

Ages and rules do not transfer between countries and we never print one country’s minimum age on another’s page. Where a market publishes no minimum age we say so, rather than printing the number most sites use.

When a fact on this site turns out to be wrong, we change it and we say that we changed it. Every article carries a corrections section listing what changed and on what date, and that section is on the page from the day it is published — before there is anything in it — so that its presence is never itself a signal.

A correction is not a quiet edit. Rewriting a sentence and updating the date is indistinguishable from having been right all along, and it is what almost every site in this industry does. One site in the twenty-five we studied publishes a correction record.

The same applies to our own research: where a finding of ours turns out to be too broad, we correct it where it stands and say what the counter-example was, rather than deleting the claim.

There is still nowhere on this site to send us a correction. No form and no address. That is a real gap in a page that has just spent several sections asking you to hold us to things, and pretending otherwise would undo the rest of it.

What does now exist is narrower, and calling it a correction route would be overstating it: every game page has a comment box. It takes a display name and 280 characters, every comment is read by a person before it appears, and it takes no links. It is a place to say what you make of a game — not a channel for telling us a figure on it is wrong, because nothing routes what you write to whoever would have to check the figure, and a comment saying so could sit approved and unanswered for a month.

Nothing on this page or on any article can be replied to at all. A contact route is still planned, and until it exists this section will keep saying so.