Community Guidelines

These guidelines are part of the Terms of Use. They apply to reviews, comments, business posts and pictures.

Write about what happened to you. That is the whole rule; the rest is detail.

• First-hand experience only. Somewhere you went, something you bought, work someone did for you. Not what you heard, not what you read on another site, not a different branch of the same chain.
• Do not review your own business, and do not have your family or your staff do it either.
• Do not review a competitor. Ever. Not even accurately.
• Do not trade reviews for anything. If you got a discount, a free item or a raffle entry for writing it, do not write it.
• One review per business. If something changes, edit the one you have rather than adding another.
• Be specific. “Booked for Tuesday, turned up Thursday, fixed it properly” helps a neighbour decide. “Terrible” helps nobody.
• Keep other people out of it. Do not name individual staff, and never post somebody's home address, personal phone number or photograph.
• No slurs, no threats, no harassment. You can say a business was bad without going after a person.
• No advertising. A review is not a place to link to your own site or leave a phone number.

Most reviews appear straight away. Reviews are not held in a queue by default — business listings are the thing that gets checked before publication, not reviews.

Some reviews are held for a person to read first. That is not an accusation, and it is not permanent. It happens when something about the submission needs a human eye — for example it contains links or contact details, the same text has already been posted elsewhere on the site, or an unusual number of reviews turned up on one listing or from one connection in a short space of time.

If yours is held, your account will tell you it is waiting. It will not be counted in the business's rating and it will not be shown until a moderator has read it. You will not be told precisely which check it tripped — that would simply teach people how to step around it.

A held review is held. It is not deleted, and honest reviews that get held are published.

• You can edit your review whenever you like.
• We keep the earlier version. Not on the page — in our records. This stops a five-star review being rewritten into a one-star accusation after the owner has publicly thanked the reviewer for it, which would leave their reply reading like agreement.
• You can delete your review. It comes off the site at once. We keep the record, because other people may have replied to it or reported it.

• You get one public reply per review, shown underneath it. Use it. A calm, specific reply to a bad review is read by everybody who comes afterwards and it does you more good than the review does you harm.
• Do not put the customer's details in your reply. Not their full name, not their order number, not their address — even if they got the facts wrong.
• Do not threaten a reviewer, on the site or off it. That is the fastest way to lose a listing here.
• A bad review is not, on its own, something we will remove. If it is genuinely from a customer and it is their honest account, it stays. Reply to it instead.
• If a review is not from a customer at all, is about a different business, contains somebody's private details, or states something as fact that is simply untrue — report it, and say why.

You can remove your listing from the public directory at any time from your account.

Be clear about what that does to reviews: it hides them, it does not delete them. They come straight back if you put the listing back. Opting out is a way to stop being listed, not a way to erase what customers wrote — and we say so plainly because otherwise somebody will try it as a way of clearing a bad week.

• Comments go under business posts and under reviews. They are public.
• You can edit a comment for about fifteen minutes, then it sets. People reply to comments, and rewriting the sentence somebody answered is how a thread gets used to put words in a neighbour's mouth. Fifteen minutes fixes a typo; it does not rewrite history.
• Disagree with the point, not the person.
• Do not pile on. One clear comment beats six.

• Post about your own business — an offer, an event, a change of hours, news.
• Offers must be real and the dates must be right. A post with an end date drops off on its own when it expires, so use the dates rather than leaving stale offers up.
• Do not post about somebody else's business, and do not use a post to criticise a competitor.
• This is not a classifieds board or a place for political campaigning.

• Post pictures you took, or that you have the right to post.
• Do not post photographs of people who have not agreed to it, and never of children who are not yours.
• Do not take pictures off Google, a stock library or somebody else's website.
• Anyone with the link can fetch a picture once it is uploaded — see the Privacy Policy. Do not upload anything you would not want handed around.
• If a picture of yours is here without permission, use the copyright takedown route.

There is a Report link on reviews, owner replies, listings and pictures. You need to be signed in to use it.

• Pick the reason that fits. The list covers the real cases: the reviewer was never a customer, it states something untrue as fact, it targets an individual, it is hateful or threatening, it is spam, it was written by the owner or a competitor, it contains private details, it is about a different business entirely, or something else.
• Notes are optional but they help. Say what is wrong in your own words — and do not repeat the offending material back to us in full, we can already see it.
• You can report a particular item once. Reporting it again does not move it up the queue.
• Do not use reports to pressure someone. Reports made in bad faith are a problem in themselves.

Moderators are people. They read the item, the context, and any reports about it. They can:

• Leave it alone — the most common outcome for a report about a bad review.
• Publish something that was being held.
• Hide it — off the public page, still there in the record.
• Remove it.
• Suspend a listing, or suspend an account.
• Approve or send back a new business listing.

Every decision is written down — who made it, what it was, what it was about, why, and when — and that record is kept even after the content itself is gone. It cannot be edited or deleted from within the site. That is as much a protection for you as it is for us.

If we act on something you wrote, we tell you in your account. If you reported something, we may not write back to you individually — but it was read.

A suspended account stops appearing across the site: the profile, the posts, the comments and the likes all go with it, not just the one item.

You can block another member. After that you do not see them and they do not see you — it works in both directions from a single click, because a block that only worked one way would leave the other person free to read and quote you while you thought it was over.

They are not told. They simply stop seeing you. Unblocking is a separate, deliberate action rather than a toggle, so a stray double-click cannot quietly undo it.

• Remove a truthful negative review because the business asked. An honest account of a bad experience is exactly what a directory like this is for.
• Decide who is right. We are not a court or a consumer body. If the facts are genuinely in dispute between you and a business, that is between you and them.
• Check anyone's paperwork. We do not verify licenses, insurance or qualifications. Do your own checks before you hire somebody.

If you think we got a decision wrong, write to weldon@weldonpc.com and say which item and why. A person will read it.