Moderation
Review guidelines
Published so you know what we will run before you spend an hour writing it — and so a company can see the standard we hold reviews to.
What we publish
- First-hand experience only. What happened to you. Not what someone in your writing group told you, and not what you read in a forum thread.
- Facts you can describe. What you were quoted, what you paid, what the contract said, what arrived and when.
- Your conclusions, clearly yours. “I would not sign with them again” is fine. So is a five-star review.
What we reject
- Named individuals below executive level. Criticise the company and its leadership. Do not name the junior designer.
- Unverifiable accusations of crime. “They committed fraud” is a legal conclusion. “I paid $8,000 in March and received nothing by December” is what happened to you, and it is stronger.
- Competitor reviews. We check submissions against claimed-profile domains. If you work for a company, you cannot review it or its competitors.
- Second-hand accounts, duplicates, and anything off-topic.
Evidence and the Verified badge
You can attach contracts, invoices or email screenshots. They go to a private store, they are visible only to moderators, and they are never published, never shown to the company, and not reachable from any public URL. If the evidence supports what you wrote, the review gets a Verified badge.
Evidence raises the quality of the whole directory and it is what lets us stand behind a review when a company complains.
Anonymity
You can publish under a display name or anonymously. Anonymous hides your name from readers; it does not remove the verified account behind the review, and moderators can still see it. We do not disclose the identity behind an anonymous review to the company it concerns.
If your review is rejected
You get the reason and one chance to edit and resubmit. Most rejections are fixable — usually a named individual, or a conclusion where a description would work better.
If a company asks us to remove your review
What a review does not do
It does not set the company’s directory standing. Standings are an editorial judgement made by a named editor against documented evidence, and no process on this site converts a rating average into a tier. How standings are decided.