How Affiliate Forge works
Every number on the terminal is computed, not curated. This page documents the full pipeline — sources, scoring formulas, and cadence — so you can judge the signal for yourself.
The pipeline
Affiliate Forge runs fully automatically every 10 hours. Each cycle it fetches 300+ public sources — industry RSS feeds (SBC News, iGaming Business, CasinoBeats, AffPapa and others), Google News query streams across regulation, jobs, deals, risk and case studies, plus community feeds — then filters for iGaming relevance, removes spam and duplicates (URL + title-similarity dedup), and classifies every item.
GEO Heat Index
score = 100 × heat_raw / max(heat_raw across GEOs)
Mentions are matched per jurisdiction with word-boundary alias sets (country names, key cities, regulator names like MGA, UKGC, PAGCOR, ONJN). The ▲▼ delta compares against the previous cycle, stored in the terminal's own history.
Affiliate Opportunity Index
One fused, opinionated call per market, clamped to 0–100: Prime Window ≥75 · Heating ≥60 · Watch ≥45 · Caution ≥30 · Avoid <30. Regulatory tailwinds/headwinds are detected from approval/licensing versus ban/fine/revocation language in that GEO's coverage this cycle.
Operator Intelligence
Each of the 55+ tracked brands gets: momentum (mentions vs its own 5-cycle average), a severity-weighted risk score (high ×3, medium ×2, low ×1 across complaint/fine/breach coverage), and expansion signals (hiring mentions ×2 + deal mentions). Leaderboards rank the extremes.
Risk severity
High = fines, license revocations, fraud, AML, breaches, lawsuits. Medium = complaints, warnings, disputes, geo-blocks. Low = everything else risk-flagged. Keyword-driven, applied identically every cycle.
History & trends
Every cycle appends a snapshot (section counts, per-GEO heat, per-operator mentions, per-operator risk & hiring, and opportunity verdicts) to a rolling 60-cycle history (~25 days). That history powers the deltas, sparklines, Trends charts, the operator risk/hiring memory, and the public track record.
Operator risk & hiring memory
Because each operator's risk and hiring numbers are stored every cycle, we compute a trend against that operator's own recent baseline (mean of the prior window). A move is labelled rising / rising fast / stable / cooling only when it clears a threshold scaled to the baseline, so a big brand needs a bigger move to register. Every readout sentence cites the real numbers behind it (how many high/medium signals, the delta versus the prior cycles). Cycles recorded before a metric existed are treated as "unknown", never as zero — so a brand shows "first readings" rather than a false spike on day one.
Signal alerts
After each cycle the terminal checks for threshold crossings — an operator's risk trending up fast, a market crossing into a Prime Window (≥75), a fresh high-severity risk event, a hiring spike, or a dated regulatory milestone getting close. Each becomes a short alert that cites the trigger. Alerts are computed mechanically and de-duplicated against a rolling log; nothing is hand-written.
Regulatory countdown
Countdowns are shown only when an explicit future date is extracted from the source coverage (e.g. "takes effect January 2027") alongside a milestone context word. If no real date is present, no countdown is shown — we never estimate or guess a date. Weeks-remaining is computed from that extracted date. Treat it as a signal to verify with the regulator, not as legal advice.
Contact
Operator, affiliate or data partner? Affiliateforge@outlook.com — or reach the desk via Telegram.