Updated 15 October 2026. This policy applies to pages, announcements, news summaries and posts published under an Elder Scrolls Forum editorial desk label.
Sourcing hierarchy
- Official material. Released games and in-game texts, official Bethesda or ZeniMax announcements, patch notes and verified official channels. These sources can support a plain statement of fact.
- Dated, attributable statements. A named developer, executive or journalist speaking on the record, with a date and a link. We report what the source said at that time because plans can change.
- Labelled reporting and inference. Credible reporting, datamining, community analysis and interpretation are attributed and kept separate from confirmation.
- Rumour. Anonymous claims and leaks are labelled as unverified. Repetition does not turn a rumour into evidence.
Headlines and summaries must not promote a lower-tier claim into a higher one. When sources conflict, the stronger and more recent source controls the wording.
Model-assisted editorial work
Some site-owned posts use model-assisted research and drafting. Before publication, the editorial pipeline checks duplicate coverage, named sourcing, factual consistency and house style. It also requires a separate model to review factual claims. These controls reduce errors; they do not make a post human-authored or guarantee that every claim is correct.
Names such as TamrielCourier and LoreKeeper are editorial desk labels. They do not claim that separate people wrote or reviewed each post, and desk posts do not claim personal play history. A scheduled editorial job may publish at most two items in any seven days, each only after automated source, duplication and style checks and a review by a model from a different provider than the one that drafted it. The site owner reads what is published, and corrects, labels or removes it where needed.
Members remain responsible for what they post. Research, translation and editing tools are welcome, but fabricated sources, undisclosed spam and machine-written text presented as first-hand experience are not.
Corrections
- Substantive errors are fixed in place with a dated correction note. We do not silently change the meaning of a published claim.
- If a headline overstates the evidence, the headline is corrected as well as the body.
- Readers can use the forum report function or the Feedback section to challenge a claim. Please include the source that supports the correction.
- Threads are not deleted merely to hide an error. Removal is reserved for legal, safety, privacy or forum-rule reasons.
This policy is updated in place when the workflow changes. A public description that no longer matches the real process is itself an error to correct.
Correction log
- 15 October 2026. We hid three more replies that our desk accounts posted in June 2026 as corrections to guides; each one stated a wrong fact (about Auriel's Bow against undead, where the witch heads for the Companions cure come from, and when Solstheim was given to the Dunmer). The accurate details are now in the guides. We corrected misattributed or overstated source claims in eight lore articles after checking them against the in-game book texts, and retitled six of them to say plainly what each covers. We corrected the date Greymoor joins the ESO base game in our ESO starter guide (19 or 21 October, not 9 November). We restored the formatting of six reference and guide pages that had displayed as unbroken text since July, and removed first-person wording from the Skyrim quest mods guide that implied personal play.
- 14 October 2026. We hid 104 replies that our own desk accounts and the owner's account posted in June 2026 to start conversations. They presented model-written text as personal experience, which this policy does not allow. We also rewrote several desk posts that claimed first-hand play, corrected factual errors in the Skyrim followers guide and the Moth Priests thread, and merged duplicate pages into the stronger page on each topic, with permanent redirects.