Comments are incredibly helpful for consumers to read before making online purchases. At ConsumersAdvocate.org our editors are committed to ensuring the integrity of our comment board. This is an ongoing challenge and core to our editorial philosophy.
Comment Guidelines:
- Fake Comments: We have filters in place to programmatically identify fake comments. If a comment is determined to be fraudulent, it will be removed.
- Comments from real Customers: We work hard to curate comments from people who have firsthand experience using a product or service. We think that comments from real consumers help potential customers evaluate a product or service. However, if you are not an actual customer, your review will be removed. We consider you to be an actual customer if you’ve purchased the good or service being commented on and have had some experience with it beyond the initial transaction. In the case of certain lending institutions, we also consider you to be a customer if you made a substantial effort to do business with the lender, regardless of whether the loan was issued. We may also publish comments that document how people who didn't make a purchase were treated following their initial inquiries when such comments are helpful to people deciding whether to provide their contact information to a particular company.
- Multiple Reviews: You may submit multiple comments about different companies, but we do not permit our readers to submit multiple comments about the same company. Each customer can only comment on a company one time. If you have additional things to say about a company after you’ve published a comment, then please edit your comment, rather than submitting multiple comments about that same company. Our system will flag these submissions.
- Inappropriate or Profane Content: Colorful language and imagery is encouraged. However, harassment, threats, racism, bigotry, hateful speech, or profanity is not accepted.
- Privacy: Don’t publicize other people’s private information. We will not publish your comment if it contains other people’s email addresses, phone numbers, addresses and full names.
- Promotional Content: We will not publish comments that promote or discuss businesses other than the one being commented on. We will not publish comments that contain spammy links. Your comment should provide objective value to consumers, not be a means of commercial gain.
- Relevance & Coherence: Your contributions should be relevant to the company you’re commenting on and coherent to those reading your comment. If a comment is explicitly about the wrong company, incoherent, or written by a non-human spam bot, it will be flagged and removed.
- Accuracy: What you say has a very real impact on the companies you comment on. Please take this responsibility seriously by sharing the most honest portrayal of your own personal experiences. If a company deserves a negative comment, please try to remain objective and do not misrepresent facts because you’re angry.
- Paying for Reviews: At no point may businesses pay consumers or offer discounts or gifts in exchange for positive comments about their own product, or in exchange for negative comments about a competitor’s service.
- Intellectual Property: Comments may not contain content that’s been stolen from other websites or sources. Please write your own comments and do so in your own words.
- Defamation and Insults: We encourage candid comments and understand that they will sometimes be critical of a company and its employees. However, we will not publish comments with defamatory statements or those that include gratuitous insults. Keep it civil. If you received terrible customer service, say so – but we will remove comments that resort to name-calling or derogatory statements unrelated to the customer experience. We will also not publish comments that contain derogatory comments about named companies or named people other than the company being commented on and its employees.