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Review guidelines

These are the rules a moderator applies. They are written to be checkable: each removal cites the clause it relied on, and the reviewer sees that clause.

Write about your own experience

  • Review a business you actually dealt with, about something that actually happened.
  • Second-hand accounts, hypotheticals and reviews of businesses you have only read about are removed.
  • If your experience was a long time ago, say so. Old experiences are welcome; undated ones are misleading.

Declare any connection

  • Do not review your own employer, your own business, or a competitor.
  • If you received anything at all in exchange — a discount, a gift, a free upgrade — say so in the review.
  • We remove incentivised reviews that hide the incentive, not reviews that disclose it.

Leave people out of it

  • Do not include anyone's full name, address, phone number, order number or payment details — including your own.
  • Naming a customer-facing member of staff by first name is fine. Anything more identifying is removed.

No threats, no extortion

  • Do not use a review, or the threat of one, to extract a refund or a discount.
  • Businesses can report this, and we keep the evidence privately.
  • Equally: a business threatening a reviewer with legal action to force a removal is grounds for us to record it publicly on that profile.

For businesses

  • Invite every eligible customer, not the ones you expect to be happy. Selective invitation is a breach of these terms.
  • Reply publicly as much as you like. Replies are never moderated for being defensive.
  • Dispute a review if it is factually about someone else, breaks these rules, or was not a real transaction. Do not dispute one for being critical.
  • Never offer anything in exchange for a review, a rating, or a removal.