Fact-Checking Policy
What has to be true before a page goes live, and what happens when something turns out not to be.
Most of what this site publishes is about games we built, which makes verification unusually straightforward: a claim about a scoring rule can be checked by reading the rule. This page sets out how that works and what happens when we get something wrong.
What gets checked
Game mechanics. Every statement about how a game behaves — scoring values, multiplier caps, timing windows, difficulty progression — is verified against the game's actual behaviour before publication. These are also published on each game page, so readers can check them too.
Numbers. Any figure in an article is either a game rule (verifiable in the game) or an external fact (sourced and linked). There is no third category. We do not publish approximate figures presented as precise ones.
External claims. Anything about the wider world — browser support, technology history, general physics — is linked to a source a reader can open.
Strategy advice. Held to a lower but still real standard: it has to survive repeated play, not one good session. Advice that worked once and not again does not get published.
Sources we use
- Official technical documentation, such as MDN Web Docs for
browser behaviour
- Primary sources from the organisation concerned, for anything about a specific product or platform
- Established educational and reference works for general science and background
Sources we do not use
- Other games sites repeating each other without a primary source
- Anything we cannot link to
- Statistics with no origin, however widely repeated
- AI-generated "facts" that cannot be traced to a source
What we do not claim
No invented statistics. If we do not have a number, we do not use one. You will not find "played by 2 million people" or "the most popular basketball game" on this site, because we have no basis for either.
No user ratings. We do not collect user reviews, so we do not display review scores. A star rating on a site that collects no ratings is a fabrication.
No affiliations. Basketball Arcade has no connection to the NBA, WNBA, FIBA, any league, club or player, and no page will imply one.
No credentials. Our authors are writers and editors. They are not described as professional players, coaches or officials, because they are not.
Corrections
Anyone can report an error. Email editorial@basketballarcade.xyz or use the contact page. You do not need to explain who you are.
What happens next:
- We check the claim against the source or the game.
- If it is wrong, it is corrected — usually the same week, faster for anything that could mislead.
- Significant corrections are noted on the page. If a correction changes what a reader would
conclude, we say what was changed rather than quietly editing it.
- Typos, broken links and formatting fixes are made without a note.
What counts as significant: a wrong number, a mis-stated game rule, an incorrect claim about how something works, or advice that turns out to be wrong. Anything a reader might have acted on.
Scheduled reviews
Every page gets a next-review date when it is published. A page is reviewed sooner if any of these happen:
- A game it describes changes. Any change to scoring, difficulty or controls triggers a review
of every page that mentions it.
- An outbound link breaks. Links are checked periodically.
- A reader reports a problem.
- Browser behaviour changes in a way that affects something we have written about.
When a review results in a genuine change, the page gets a Last updated date. When it does not, the page keeps its original date. We do not refresh dates for freshness — see the editorial policy.
Where our own numbers come from
A note on the figures that appear throughout this site — scoring values, multiplier caps, timing tolerances, difficulty steps.
These are the games' actual parameters. They are published on each game page in the scoring and difficulty sections, and they are the same values the game code uses to judge you. When a game's parameters change, the game page changes and every guide that references them is reviewed.
That is the strongest verification available to us, and it is one of the reasons we only write in depth about games we built.