First-hand testing methodology
Operator review pages on Due North Odds are based on first-hand observation, not marketing material. A named reviewer visits each operator’s Ontario site and records what is actually shown, so every published detail can be traced to a dated, captured source.
Who tests
Testing is carried out by a named human reviewer, credited on each review page together with the date of the visit. Observations are recorded first-hand and are never copied from an operator’s promotional copy or from third-party affiliate sites.
What we capture
For each operator we record dated screenshots of the public site and the registration flow — for example the game categories that are offered, the customer-support channels, and the operator’s logo. Each recorded fact is published with its source and the date it was observed, alongside the registration status we verify against the official iGaming Ontario register.
How we use third-party reviews
Alongside our own first-hand testing, we consult reviews and ratings published by independent third-party platforms. We consult, attribute, and never reproduce: we statistically analyse what other reviewers report, we credit every source we used with a direct link (marked nofollow), and we never copy or republish their review text or their scores as our own. Anything we publish from this analysis is our own summary of the patterns we measured, shown separately from — and never counted toward — our first-hand findings.
Third-party data
Where a review site has published a rating, a review count or a complaint counter, we show that number as a fact about that site’s opinion on a given date: the figure exactly as the site published it, on the site’s own scale, carrying the site’s own wording for it where the site uses one, the date we read it, and a link to the page we read it on. We never convert a score onto a different scale and we never average two sites together — a 9.3 out of 10 and a 2.3 out of 5 are two sites answering two different questions, and blending them would produce a figure nobody published.
What we work out ourselves is shown separately and labelled as ours: counts over a source’s full set of player reviews — how many sit in the top and bottom bands of that site’s own scale, how many drew a reply from the operator, how the newest reviews compare with the older ones — and our own reading of the complaint threads a site makes visible to a reader. Those are our measurements of published data, never the source’s conclusions restated as ours.
We do not reproduce third-party material. We publish no review text, no reviewer names and no reviewer profiles, and no copy of a source’s tables — only the aggregate figures we cite and the statistics we compute from them. None of it enters the structured data our pages emit, and every link to a source is marked nofollow.
We re-read each source on a 35-day cycle. Every reading carries the date it was taken, and a reading that has not been refreshed within twice that window — 70 days — comes off the page instead of being shown as though it were current, because an old figure under a fresh date is worse than no figure. If every reading from a source goes stale, that source’s block comes off the page whole; we never leave an empty one behind to suggest we looked and found nothing.
If you publish a site we consult: our crawler identifies itself as PerceptBot and carries a contact address in its user-agent string on every request it makes, and that address reaches us. Write to it to have a reading corrected, to change how we attribute you, or to ask us to stop consulting you at all. Withdrawing a source is a deletion on our side, not a negotiation, and it takes effect on the next daily build.
Scope and limits
- Coverage is limited to operators registered with iGaming Ontario.
- We record each operator’s public site and its registration / onboarding flow, and we verify its registration status against the official iGaming Ontario register. We do not complete real-money play, and we do not carry out deposit or withdrawal testing, because that requires Ontario residency — so banking and cash-out details are out of scope.
- We respect every age, identity, and residency check — we never bypass them — and we never record the personal information of any individual.
- Each observation reflects a point in time; an operator may change its site after the recorded date, so facts carry the date they were observed.