Fixing Mistakes

This site publishes technical claims about other people’s systems. Some of them will be wrong. What matters is what happens next, so here is the procedure, written down in advance rather than improvised when it is needed.

How to report one

Email the address on Reach the Desk with three things: the page, the sentence, and what you believe is correct. A link to the document that settles it — the standard, the register entry, the regulator’s notice — moves it from a disagreement to a fix in one step.

You do not need to identify yourself, and you do not need a stake in the subject. A reader who spotted a wrong protocol version is as useful as a company’s compliance team.

What happens then

1. Acknowledgement — normally within five working days, saying whether we are checking it or already agree.
2. Verification against the source. Not against our memory of it, and not against a summary. If the claim came from a document, the document is opened again.
3. The fix, at the right size — see the scale below.
4. A reply telling you what changed, or why nothing did. A report that turns out to be wrong still gets an answer explaining the reasoning.

The scale of the fix

• Typographical. Spelling, punctuation, a broken link, a mangled name. Fixed silently, because nothing about the meaning changes.
• Clarification. The statement was defensible but easy to misread. The wording is tightened and a short note is added at the foot of the article saying what was clarified and when.
• Correction. The article said something factually wrong. The passage is fixed and a dated correction notice is added to the article itself, describing what it previously said. The original error is described, not quietly deleted — a correction you cannot see is not a correction.
• Retraction. The article’s central claim does not survive. It is marked as retracted at the top, the reason is stated, and the URL stays live rather than disappearing, so that anyone who linked to it or acted on it can find out why.

Corrections are never made in a way that hides the change: the article’s visible review date updates, and the notice stays on the page permanently rather than for a decent interval.

Routine updates are not corrections

Standards get revised, registers get reorganised, certification schemes get retired. When an article is re-checked and something has moved, the page’s review date changes and the article is updated — that is maintenance, and it does not get a correction notice unless the previous version had become misleading. Where the update reverses the article’s advice, it is treated as a correction and labelled as one.

Requests we decline

A company asking for a passage to be removed because it is unflattering is not a correction request. If the passage is wrong it is corrected; if it is right it stays, whatever the commercial relationship. That rule is the same one described on Funding and Links, and it is the point of publishing the method on How We Research in the first place — a claim we cannot support should never have been printed, and one we can support does not come down for the asking.

A response on the record from an operator, regulator or testing house is published in full alongside the passage it concerns, whether or not we agree with it.

What this policy cannot fix

Complaints about a gambling operator — a withdrawal, a bonus, a closed account — are not corrections to this site and we have no way to act on them. They go to the operator, then to its regulator; see Licences and Regulators.