Community guidelines

LocalRank Community is not open yet. We are publishing the guidelines in advance so the rules are settled before the first post, rather than written in reaction to the first problem.

We will not pre-populate the community with fabricated activity. When it opens it will be empty, and that is the honest starting point.

• Write from experience. “I used them last month” is worth more than a guess.
• Be specific. What it cost, how long it took, what went wrong.
• Disagree with the argument, not the person.
• Disclose any connection to a business you are discussing.

• Posting as a customer when you work for, own, or were paid by the business.
• Reviews of your own business, or of a direct competitor.
• Coordinated posting, vote manipulation, or multiple accounts.
• Personal information about anyone, including staff names and phone numbers.
• Harassment, hate speech, or threats.
• Anything unlawful, or defamatory claims presented as fact.
• Spam and affiliate links.

A review must describe a real experience you had. We store signals that help us detect coordinated or fake reviews, and reviews we flag are excluded from a business’s rating until resolved.

Businesses cannot pay to remove a review. We remove reviews that break these rules or that are shown to be factually false. Commercial status is never an input to that decision, and our moderation tools do not display it.

Any signed-in member can report a post, a reply or a piece of feedback that breaks these guidelines. A report does not hide anything by itself, however many people make one: the content stays up until a moderator has looked at it and decided.

A moderator reads the report and the content, and either takes action under these guidelines or closes the report because nothing needed doing. In your account you can see each report you made as open, reviewed, or action taken. We do not tell you who reviewed it, what was said to the author, or whether anyone else also reported the same thing.

LocalRank does not promise a fixed response time. Reports are read by people, and how quickly depends on how many there are. If something puts a person in immediate danger, contact the emergency services rather than relying on a report.

Automated checks flag content for a human to look at. Only a moderator removes content, except for exact matches against a spam blocklist.

Every moderation action records who took it, why, and a snapshot of the content. If your content is removed you will be told the reason and can appeal — an appeal is reviewed by a different moderator where possible.

Guidelines apply to everyone equally, including businesses that advertise with us.