Guidelines to Reviewers

Rating Icon comes to change the world with your help. We do this by giving you a powerful, open review platform where you share and discover experiences and connect to businesses to help them improve. The only thing we ask is that you respect and follow these guidelines (together with our Terms of Use) to help us all keep Rating Icon a collaborative and trustworthy place for everyone to enjoy. Thanks for getting on board — let's upgrade the world!

When to write a review

You can write a review if you've had a recent, genuine experience. A review can't be written if a company has given an incentive for it. This includes discounts, monetary rewards, loyalty points, gifts, coupons, and even referral bonuses. These are forms of incentives that undermine the integrity of reviews. If you received an incentive, you can report it to us here. Reviews are your opportunity to share experiences with others and give feedback to companies. Size doesn’t matter here, we think all experiences big and small are worth reviewing — whether it’s a phone call, an online order, a visit to your local store or otherwise using a company’s products or service. Just keep it fresh by writing about your experience that happened in the past 12 months. While your tale of buying a boombox in the 80s is cool, it's not as relevant to consumers looking to invest in today's hi-tech audio products. When you share your recent experiences, other readers get a feel for how a company is operating now. And companies get valuable up-to-date feedback. Learn more about who can write a review and when.

Don't write a fake or biased review

Never invent an experience or write a review for someone else — let them do it for themselves. Also, if you have a close association with, work for, or are in direct competition with a company, then you should not review it. You shall not accept any incentive to write, modify or delete a review.

Keep evidence of your experience

Hold onto documentation that shows you've had an experience with the company (for example, a receipt, order confirmation, screenshot of your chat with online customer service) because you might be asked to verify your experience.

What exactly is defamatory?

That's a tough one to explain. We're in the middle: we're sitting between the consumers and the businesses, and thus we need to balance the conflicting responsibilities - wanting to allow everybody to share their story (be it good or bad) and yet still required to take down words and statements that unjustly cause significant damage to people's reputations or serious financial loss to a business. The strongest reviews explain what happened and then let the readers form their own opinion. We stay out of fights about what really went down between a reviewer and a business. Rating Icon is a consumer review platform, not a regulatory agency or a court of law.

Promos are a no-go

Keep your reviews relevant — no promotional references, marketing material or links. It's not the place to sell stuff, offer discount codes, form action groups or meet other like-minded singles in your area.

Keep private information private

Your reviews are public. That's why it isn't a good idea to include your own personal or private information, and it's never okay to include someone else's. We're talking names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and anything else that could be used to track, identify, contact, or impersonate someone. We want the privacy and safety of you and others to be respected and protected.

Check the domain you're reviewing.

You might be amazed how often the opposite happens; someone leaves a review for Company A on the profile page of Company B. (Trust us, on our Rating Icon's own profile page we're quite frequently told just how much everyone hates or adores our totally nonexistent delivery service! So double check the company and country domain you're leaving the review about, before publishing, to save future headaches.

Your user account.

Just like your first kiss, you only get one user account and it should involve a real person. Your username, profile description and picture must reflect who you are (don’t go impersonating other people, thanks) and can’t be harmful, hateful, discriminatory, defamatory or obscene — because everyone can see your profile! If you do include something you shouldn't, or you create more than one account, we can delete your account/s. Your user account also needs to be connected to a valid, permanent email address in case we need to contact you. Sometimes your account is automatically created and pre-filled with your name, like if you click on an email invitation link from a company or sign up via Facebook. You can always edit your details to include only the information you want publicly displayed.

Edit or delete your review

Your review belongs to you. That means you can edit, update or delete your review at any time. You're encouraged to update an existing review if you want to add more information about a particular experience. And while it's fine to write more than one review for a business if you've had more than one experience, please don't bombard a business with lots of reviews, because that's not helpful for anyone.

Everyone can flag reviews

We love it when you put on your superhero sidekick shirt and help us protect our platform by letting us know about problematic reviews — especially if you've got proof. Only flag a review if you genuinely believe there's a problem, and please be fair and consistent. We'll check flagged reviews to see if they breach our guidelines. And if they do, we'll take action.

Dealbreakers

We're all for freedom of expression, but some content just won't fly. If someone flags your review for breaking our rules, we may temporarily hide it and ask you to make some changes. We'll give you the opportunity to bring genuine reviews within our guidelines so they can stay on Rating Icon. But if you seriously misuse our platform we can remove your reviews and/or block or delete your account. If your account is deleted, your reviews will be deleted too. Also, our super cool software is always on the lookout for suspicious and fake reviews and will remove them.

The final word

These guidelines are the guidelines for our guiding principles. Please bear in mind that we have the last word with regard to the interpretation and application of these guidelines, and we can update them at any time. If you'd like more detailed information about how we work, you are welcome to visit our Support Center.