A destination guide is only worth reading if you can tell where its information came from. This page explains our rules so you can hold us to them.
Every number has a source
We do not estimate, round for effect, or publish a figure we cannot point at. Tide times and water temperature come live from named NOAA gauges, and we print the station identifier next to the reading. Business hours and ratings come from Google Places on a refresh schedule. Regulations link to the agency that sets them rather than being restated here, because a restated rule goes stale and a stale rule can cost somebody a citation.
When the nearest available measurement is not actually local, we say so. NOAA has no water temperature sensor on the Waccamaw Neck, so our reading comes from Springmaid Pier at Myrtle Beach, and the page names that station rather than implying the water was measured in Pawleys Creek.
What we will not publish
- Invented facts. If we do not know something, the sentence comes out rather than getting filled with a plausible guess.
- Invented specifics of any kind: hours, prices, phone numbers, distances, dates, founding years, visitor counts.
- A statistic without a source.
- Folklore presented as history. The Gray Man is a story, and we call it a story.
- Reviews or testimonials we did not receive from real people.
- An author byline for a person who does not exist. If a page has no named author yet, it says so.
Opinion is labelled
We have views about where to eat, which stretch of beach suits which kind of day, and how to fish the creek. Those are ours, they are marked as ours, and you are free to disagree. Field notes and tips are experience, not measurement, and they are presented that way.
Money and disclosure
- No business can buy an editorial recommendation. Ever.
- Directory placement is not for sale. Ranking is driven by Google rating and review volume, which we do not control.
- If a piece of content is sponsored, paid, or the result of a comped meal, stay or trip, it will say so plainly at the top, not in small print at the bottom.
- If we ever use affiliate links, they will be disclosed on the page where they appear.
- We are independent and locally run. We are not an agent for any business on this site.
Corrections
We will get things wrong. When we do, we fix the page and note what changed rather than quietly editing and moving on. Substantive corrections carry a dated note. Email [email protected] and tell us what is wrong; a specific correction with a source gets fixed faster than a general complaint.
For a wrong business listing, the fastest permanent fix is usually for the owner to correct their own Google Business Profile, because that is where our data comes from. Tell us anyway and we will hide or re-sync the record in the meantime.
Review schedule
Live data refreshes on its own. Editorial pages carry a last reviewed date, and seasonal content such as the fishing calendar is checked against the current season. Pages that go stale get updated or unpublished rather than left up to rot.
Machine assistance
We use software to help draft, structure and check this site, the same way we use a spell checker and a build script. Every published claim is reviewed by a person against a source before it goes up, and nobody gets a byline for work they did not do. Software does not get the final say on whether a fact is true.
Accessibility is an editorial standard
Clear headings, plain language, real alt text and answerable questions are not separate from good writing, they are part of it. See our accessibility statement for the technical side.
Questions about this document? [email protected]