Editorial · Updated July 2026
The rules behind the ratings — how we source figures, what independence actually means when the site runs on affiliate commission, how a review moves from draft to published, how conflicts of interest get handled internally, and how we deal with getting something wrong.
MzansiSpins earns money when a reader signs up through one of our links — that's disclosed in full on our advertising disclosure page and in the footer of every page on this site. Commission rate has no input into a casino's Spin Dial score. The score is built entirely from the weighted categories described in how we rate casinos, and an operator paying a higher commission does not move them up that scale.
In practice, this means we sometimes rank an operator with a smaller affiliate payout above one with a larger payout, if the smaller-payout operator has faster withdrawals or fairer wagering terms. That's the point of having a methodology at all — if commission decided rankings, we wouldn't need one. Independence isn't a slogan on this page; it's a constraint we've built into the process itself by fixing the scoring weights in advance and applying them the same way to every operator, including ones we haven't tested yet.
Where possible, every figure on this site traces back to a primary source: the operator's own terms and conditions page, a screenshot of their live cashier or promotions page, or a withdrawal we processed ourselves. We treat third-party affiliate aggregator sites as a secondary source at best — useful for cross-checking, not for citing directly — because those sites are frequently months out of date or copying stale figures from each other. A number that appears identically across a dozen SEO-driven comparison sites isn't more trustworthy for the repetition; it's often evidence that nobody re-checked it.
When sources disagree — which happens often in this category, since bonus terms change frequently and get inconsistently updated across the web — we default to whichever figure we can verify against the operator's own current terms page, and note where a figure may have shifted since our last check. If we genuinely can't verify something firsthand and no primary source is available, we either leave it out or explicitly flag it as unverified rather than presenting a guess as fact.
A review doesn't go from zero to published in one step. Each one moves through the same sequence, regardless of which operator it covers or who on the team is running it.
Initial figures are pulled from the operator's own terms page, cashier, and promotions pages — not from other comparison sites.
Registration, deposit, FICA and a timed withdrawal, run against the draft to confirm it matches reality rather than marketing copy.
A second pass cross-references every number in the draft against the source material gathered in steps 1 and 2 before anything goes live.
Every review carries the date of its most recent verification so readers can judge freshness themselves.
The same testing steps run again on a fixed monthly cycle, and the review updates if anything has changed.
A reader report or an operator dispute can trigger an out-of-cycle re-check at any point — see our correction policy below.
The obvious conflict of interest on any affiliate site is commission — we've addressed how that's kept separate from scoring above and in our advertising disclosure. Beyond commission, our policy is straightforward: we don't accept free bonus credit, gifts, hospitality or any other incentive from an operator in exchange for favourable coverage, and no operator gets to review or approve a draft before it publishes. Any account we use for testing is funded and operated exactly as a normal player's would be — no special access tier, no cooperation from the operator's side beyond what any customer could get from support.
If a team member has a personal account or relationship with an operator beyond the standard testing process, that operator's review gets handled by someone else on the team. It's a small enough team that this comes up rarely, but the rule exists for when it does. The same logic extends to partnership enquiries handled through our contact page — an operator reaching out about advertising doesn't get fast-tracked onto the board or shielded from the standard testing bar described in our methodology.
We re-check every listing on a monthly cycle as standard. Outside that cycle, if a reader or an operator flags a figure that's changed, we prioritise verifying and correcting it over any other work in progress — corrections go out ahead of new content. There's no minimum severity threshold: a wrong minimum deposit amount gets fixed as readily as a wrong bonus cap. When we correct a figure, we update it in place rather than leaving the old number live alongside a caveat, because a reader landing on the page later shouldn't have to guess which version is current. You can flag anything you spot via our contact page.
Reviews are produced by a small South Africa-focused research team rather than a single named "expert" — we think that's more honest than inventing bylines for what is, in practice, a collective process of testing, cross-checking and re-verifying. Every review reflects the same methodology and lifecycle described above regardless of who ran the test that month, and no individual's judgment overrides the fixed scoring weights. We'd rather be transparent about that collective process than manufacture a personal brand around a fictional in-house expert, which is a pattern we've noticed on other comparison sites and don't think serves readers particularly well.
No — testing accounts are funded and played exactly as a normal player's would be, with no special allowance or waived requirements from the operator's side.
We report what we actually observed during testing, note the discrepancy explicitly, and factor it into the licensing & trust signals category of the score — a mismatch between stated and actual terms is treated as a meaningful red flag.
We check outbound links as part of the monthly re-verification cycle and fix anything broken immediately once flagged, whether by our own check or a reader report via our contact page.
No. Reviews publish based on our own testing and sourcing, without operator review or approval beforehand. An operator can dispute a figure after publication through our correction process, same as any reader.
The review lifecycle above — draft, live testing, internal fact-check, publish, monthly re-verification — applies regardless of who runs it, specifically to keep quality consistent rather than dependent on one person's judgment.
Most of the difference is procedural rather than a matter of intent — plenty of affiliate sites intend to be accurate. The distinction is that we've written the process down, publish it here, and hold ourselves to it even when it's inconvenient: fixed scoring weights set in advance, primary-source-only figures, mandatory monthly re-checks, and a published correction policy. Read our About Us page for the fuller story of why we built it this way.