Our Data Promise

Last audited: 2026-10-03

Every regulation ValidHunt displays comes from the Wisconsin DNR's online hunting regulations at dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/Hunt/regulations/OnlineHuntingRegulations. We extract species, season dates, zones, bag limits, required licenses, special rules, and admin-code citations from the DNR's own pages. The canonical hosted version of this document lives at https://validhunt.com/policies/data-promise — if a cached copy disagrees with what's live there, the live version wins.

What we audit, and how often

Before every production release we run a four-phase audit against the regulation catalog on the deployed site:

Coverage. Every species, season, zone, rule, DNR topic, and county in our catalog has a page on the site, and the page returns 200 OK with the entity's identifier present in the rendered HTML. Any orphan or broken route fails the gate.
Content integrity. For each entity, the facts in our catalog — season start and end dates, zones, species, statute citations, DNR section attributions — appear in the rendered page exactly as stored. No render-layer drift between what we extracted and what you see.
Invariants. Known-wrong citation patterns are rejected on the rendered pages themselves, not just at build time. If a non-deer rule ever quoted the deer-population-management admin-code section, this check would catch it the next time the page is rendered.
Source fidelity. Across every WI DNR species section — Bear, Deer, Elk, Furbearers, Migratory Game Birds, Small Game, Turkey, and Upland Birds — we sample the derived catalog entities against the DNR source HTML the extraction pipeline captured from. Season dates, bag limits, zones, and species names are all held to the DNR's text.

Our most recent audit (2026-10-03) covered 226 regulation pages. Phase 1 passed on all 226 pages. Phase 2 passed on 223 of 223 entities with checkable facts. Phase 3 passed on all 11 catalog rules. Phase 4 sampled 7 WI DNR species sections (Elk has no 2026-27 seasons to sample); 6 of the 7 passed cleanly and Deer is the exception described below.

Where we deliberately don't show something

When the DNR describes a season that applies to a geographic subset we can't scope precisely — "Participating properties," "Select Farmland Zone counties only," "metro sub-units and DMUs with extended archery season" — our pipeline refuses to render it rather than show you the hunt is legal everywhere inside the surrounding zone. Silence beats wrong-location.

Three Deer seasons currently fall in this category:

Antlerless-only Holiday Hunt (Dec 24 - Jan 1 in Select Farmland Zone counties). ValidHunt does not render this hunt on /plan yet. Check the DNR's Deer page for the participating-county list.
Archery/Crossbow metro extension through Jan 31. The main archery season in ValidHunt ends Jan 3 as it does for most hunters. In metro sub-units and DMUs with extended archery, the DNR extends through Jan 31. Check with the DNR before relying on an extended end date.
Gun Deer Hunt For Hunters With Disabilities (Oct 3 - 11 on participating properties). ValidHunt does not render this special hunt because it only applies at enrolled participating properties, which our catalog cannot scope precisely. If you hold a disability permit and want to hunt this window, check the DNR's Special Hunts page for enrolled properties.

All three exceptions are tracked openly. When our catalog can represent them without overstating where they apply, they'll appear on the site in their next release.

What this promise is not

Our terms of use already cover this ground, but to say it plainly here: ValidHunt is a planning aid. Buy your licenses from the DNR, confirm the rules at the DNR before you hunt, and report your harvests through the DNR's registration systems. The compliance-safe answer we give you is "check with the DNR first" — this promise is about the integrity of what we show you, not a replacement for the authoritative DNR source.

See Terms of Use for the complete legal framing.