Policies
Review Guidelines
Last updated
Reviews are the most useful thing on a listing, and the easiest to get wrong. These are the rules we apply, and they are the same for everyone.
Write about your own experience
A review should describe something that happened to you at that business. Not what you heard, not what happened to a friend, and not an opinion about the industry in general.
Do not name individuals
Describe the service, not the person who gave it. A named staff member cannot answer back, and a bad day at work should not follow somebody around online. "The person on the counter was unhelpful" is fine; a name is not.
Leave personal information out
Do not include anybody's phone number, email address, home address, order number or any other detail that identifies a person — yours included. We will remove them.
No advertising
A review is not a place to promote another business, post a link, or run a competitor down. We remove these without exception.
Be fair
Strong criticism is welcome when it is about your experience. Abuse, slurs, threats and accusations of criminal conduct are not, and we will not publish them.
What happens after you submit
Every review is read by a moderator before it appears. Most are published within a day or two.
If a review is almost publishable but contains one problem — a name, a phone number — we may edit it rather than refuse it. Where we do, the review carries a note saying it was edited by our moderators. The original text is kept so the decision can be reviewed.
If we cannot publish a review, it is refused with a reason recorded. We may write to you at the address you gave to explain why.
Your email address
We ask for your email address so we can contact you about the review. It is encrypted, it is never published, and it is never given to the business.
Ratings
Only published reviews count towards a business's rating. Removing a review changes the rating accordingly. A business cannot pay to have a review removed, and we will not remove one because the business asked us to — only because it breaks these guidelines.
Reporting a review
If you think a published review breaks these rules, use the report link on it. Tell us which rule and why; a moderator will look again.
The other policies
These three together describe what we do with your information, what you agree to by using the site, and what we publish.