How we work

We follow the five principles of the Code of Principles of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), adapted to a guide. We are not an IFCN signatory.

No side. We apply the same standard of evidence to every claim, whoever makes it. We take no side in any deal or dispute.

Sources you can check. Every legal statement names its official source with its number and date, and links to the text where it is online. We use primary sources wherever they exist.

Money and people in the open. We publish who funds us, every amount, and who is responsible for what we publish.

Method in the open. This page explains how a page is researched, checked and published.

Open corrections. We fix mistakes openly and list every correction with its date.

We start from the official text: the law, the regulation or the government service itself. We write what it says in plain words and link every legal statement to its dated source.

Every legal page is checked by a licensed notary. Until that check it carries the mark "Draft, under notary review". After it, the page shows the date of the check.

Every page shows the date we last checked it. The Indonesian text is checked for legal accuracy, and translations are checked by native speakers.

We never write about a specific project, company or person, good or bad. This is general information, not legal advice.

For at least our first three years, Respek Bali will not:

list properties for sale or match buyers with sellers;

rate or review people or companies;

sell advice on a deal;

name recommended developers or hand out badges;

carry advertising;

offer investment or token products;

represent anyone in a dispute.

Today the founder, Nikolay Asta, funds and runs Respek Bali. He is also a developer and hotel operator in Bali. That conflict of interest is stated on the About page, and his companies will not appear in any list of professionals we publish in the first year.

By March 2027 Respek Bali will move into a non-profit foundation (yayasan) with a board of several members. The founder will be in the minority and will not vote on any list of professionals or on anything we publish about them.

We count visits with Vercel Web Analytics, a service of our hosting provider, to learn whether the guide reaches people. We also count a few anonymous actions: which map tools are used, whether the checklist is printed, and whether the property check reaches its report and is printed. For the property check we record only whether the report was reached by answering or from a saved link, and whether a location was entered, never your answers or the location.

For each visit Vercel records the page address without its query or the part after #, the time, the referring site, the country, region and city, and the browser, operating system and device type. Vercel says it tells visits apart with a hash of the request, discards the visit session after 24 hours, and does not tie these records to any person or IP address. Vercel says the counter uses no third-party cookies. The site itself sets no cookies.

We never send map coordinates you enter, names, addresses or your answers. Browsers that send Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control are not counted.

Found a mistake? Write to hello@respekbali.com with the page and your source. We check it against the official text, with a notary where the law is involved, and reply.

If we were wrong, we fix the page and add the change to the corrections log with its date. We do not remove corrections from the log.