This page explains the framework we use to pull a review score apart, and how we handle it when we get something wrong. It’s the closest thing this desk has to a rulebook.
The five-part weighting
Every piece on this desk works from the same declared weighting: licensing and fairness evidence (30%), payout-speed evidence (25%), game-variety depth (20%), support responsiveness (15%) and terms clarity (10%). This is our own editorial framework for judging whether a review is doing its job — it is not a rating of any specific casino or pokies operator, and we don’t apply it to produce our own star scores.
How a piece gets written
- Start from a real pattern. A piece begins with something we’ve actually noticed across multiple published reviews — a format, a regional quirk, a gap in what gets disclosed — not a hypothetical.
- Check it against more than one source. We look at how the same category of claim is handled across several reviews before writing about it as a pattern, not a single example.
- Separate description from endorsement. We can describe how a review format works, or what a regional market expects, without endorsing any operator that format was used to review.
- Flag what we can’t verify. If a claim can’t be checked from where we sit, the piece says so instead of quietly smoothing over the gap.
Corrections and updates
When a factual error is found in a published piece — a wrong figure, an out-of-date regulatory detail, a broken source link — we fix it in place and note the date at the top of the article as “Last updated.” We don’t silently rewrite a piece’s conclusions; if a correction changes what the piece actually argues, we say so in the text, not just in the timestamp.
Spotted something that needs fixing? Use the Flag a Problem page — that’s the fastest way to reach us about a specific piece.
What doesn’t get published here
We don’t publish invented payout percentages, fabricated player reviews, or ratings dressed up as data we don’t actually have. If a number can’t be sourced, it doesn’t appear on this desk as if it can.