Editorial policy

This policy covers everything published on Floath: operator reviews, comparison pages, market pages, payment-method pages and guides. It is written as a set of rules the content has to satisfy rather than as a statement of intent, because the useful version of an editorial policy is the one you can hold a page against.

There is no free-text HTML field anywhere in the Floath content model, and no page renders raw markup. Copy is composed from typed blocks — paragraph, heading, list, table, callout, stats — and every comparable fact is a field with a type: a withdrawal band and an hour count, a wagering multiplier and what it applies to, a minimum deposit and its currency.

That constraint does real editorial work. A number that has to fit a field cannot be softened into an adjective, so a review cannot describe payouts as fast without also recording how many hours fast means. It also means the same figure appears identically on the review, the comparison table and the market page, because all three read the same field.

• Operator facts come from the operator's own terms, cashier and licensing pages — not from an affiliate feed, a press release or another comparison site.
• Regulator facts come from the regulator's own site. A licence badge in a site footer is not a source; the authority's published register is.
• Support organisations are checked against the organisation's own site. If a URL cannot be confirmed as belonging to the organisation, the organisation is named and described and the URL is left out.
• Every checked field gets a source row recording what was read, what type of source it was, and the date. There are 35 of those rows behind the current set, and they are internal — they exist so provenance survives staff turnover, not to decorate a page.

A record can only be promoted from demo to verified when the source rows behind its scored fields exist. That is a gate on the data, not a habit.

Reference data is held to the opposite standard. Regulators, game studios, payment brands and support organisations are real and are named accurately. What we do with them is describe what they are — never attribute behaviour, standing or an opinion to them. And no licence number, registration number, company number or regulator reference appears anywhere in Floath, real or invented: an operator's licences are recorded as a link to the authority, and the authority's own register is where a number should be read.

Floath earns affiliate commission, and the arrangement is set out in full on the affiliate disclosure page. What matters here is where the separation is enforced rather than merely promised.

• Commercial terms live in a separate entity from the casino record and are read by exactly one piece of code: the click redirect that resolves a destination URL.
• The scoring function takes two inputs — category scores and weights. There is no commercial input to pass it.
• There is no placement, priority, sponsorship or featured field on a casino record, so there is nothing an advertiser could buy even in principle.
• Ordering is derived from the score everywhere it is not explicitly set by the reader's own sort control.
• Commission rates are recorded for finance reconciliation and are not visible to anyone scoring a record.

What that does not do is make the judgement immune. A person who sets a category score is paid out of the same revenue as everyone else here, and no third party audits the model. The mitigation on offer is transparency rather than certification: the weights, the categories, the per-category scores and the arithmetic are all published, so a reader who suspects a thumb on the scale can recompute the result without our help.

• Concrete numbers beat adjectives. Approval in about two hours, not lightning-fast withdrawals.
• Every review states its trade-offs. A review with no real drawbacks is not a review, and a page whose cons section is thin says so rather than inventing a fault for symmetry.
• Costs are stated in the terms the reader will meet: a 40x requirement on deposit plus bonus is written as the turnover it produces on a real deposit.
• No promotional register. Gambling is never described as an investment, an income, a way to recover money already lost, or risk-free.
• No fabricated evidence of any kind — no invented testimonials, complaint volumes, satisfaction figures or payout tests. Where a section would carry that on a verified record, the demo record says the section is empty and why.

Corrections are the messages that get actioned first. Send the page, the specific claim and a link to the source that contradicts it, to editorial@floath.com. A figure that turns out to be wrong is changed on the record itself, which updates every page that reads it; the record is then re-stamped with new edited and reviewed dates, so the page footer shows that it moved.

We do not quietly revise a score without changing the field underneath it, and we do not publish the correspondence. Where a correction changes a category score, the change flows through the overall figure automatically, because that figure is calculated rather than stored.

Ratings changes are signed off by the head of ratings. Payment and cashier fields are owned by the payments editor, bonus terms by the bonus analyst, and product and support findings by the product reviewer. Every trust and legal page names a single maintainer in its footer rather than a shared inbox, and a change to one of these pages goes through that person. A policy with no owner and no date is not a policy.