Terms and Conditions

1. What these terms cover

These terms are between you and TheReviews, a TJG venture operated by Ikaroa (“we”, “TheReviews”). Registered address available on request. They cover the website at thereviews.net, reviewer accounts, the reviews and other content you post, and the emails we send you. Using the site means you accept them.

If you are here for a business, claiming a profile, sending invitations, replying to reviews, using the dashboard, the API or the widgets, the Terms for Businesses apply to that use as well as these. Where the two disagree about a business activity, the business terms win.

The Review and Business Guidelines and the Privacy Policy are part of these terms.

2. Who can use TheReviews

Anyone can read reviews. To hold an account or post a review you must be 18 or over, and you must be a person, not a script. One person, one account. If we find an account belongs to someone under 18 we close it and delete the data.

You can only review a business you have dealt with as a customer. You cannot review a business you own, work for, have worked for in the last two years, or compete with. The guidelines set out the rest of what “genuine” rules out.

3. Your account

You are responsible for what is done from your account and for keeping your password to yourself. We will never ask you for it. We hold a hash of it, not the password. Signing in sets a session cookie that lasts 30 days; sign out on a shared device.

Tell us at email@thereviews.net if you think someone else has used your account. You can change your details, delete individual reviews, and delete your whole account from settings at any time. Deleting your account removes your reviews from the site within minutes and your name from the site within 24 hours.

4. Your content and the licence you give us

A review is your own work and you keep the copyright in it. So that we can run a review site, you give us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to host, display, reproduce and distribute it on TheReviews, in the widgets businesses embed on their own sites, in our emails, and through our API, with attribution to your display name, for as long as the review is on the site. We may reformat it for display but we do not change its meaning, and a business cannot edit it at all.

The licence ends when you delete the review, except that copies already sent out by email or fetched through the API before the deletion may persist where we cannot recall them, and the moderation log keeps a dated entry without the text.

You promise that what you post is true to the best of your knowledge, describes your own experience, and follows the guidelines. You are responsible for it in law, including the law of defamation. We host it; we did not write it. Section 10 says what happens when someone claims a review is unlawful.

We do not pay for reviews and you must not accept payment for one. A review written for money, a discount, a gift or a refund is removed and the account closed.

5. What you must not do

• Post a review of an experience you did not have, or of a business you have a conflict with under section 2.
• Post the same or a materially similar review more than once, or from more than one account.
• Include private information about anyone: full names of junior staff, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, vehicle registrations, or images of people.
• Include links or advertising, or write a review whose purpose is to send readers elsewhere.
• Accuse a business or a person of a crime unless you can point to a court or regulator that has found it.
• Post anything threatening, harassing, discriminatory, or unlawful to publish in the United Kingdom.
• Use automated tools to post, vote, report, or read the site beyond what a normal browser does. The API and the widgets are the supported ways to fetch content, under the business terms.
• Try to get round a hold, a removal, a suspension, or a rate limit.
• Contact a business or reviewer outside the platform to have a review changed or removed under pressure.

6. Reporting, moderation and the public log

Every review is scored automatically before it appears. The signals and their point values are published on the trust page. A review that scores 40 or more is held for a person to read within one business day. A review that scores 90 or more is not published. Being held is not a judgement; most held reviews are published unchanged.

Anyone can report a review. A member of staff reads the review and the report and decides, within two business days, whether the review breaks a specific section of the guidelines. If it does, it is removed and the log records the section. If it does not, the report is dismissed and the log records that too. You are emailed the outcome and can appeal once, within 30 days, with anything that supports the review. A different moderator reads the appeal.

Every hold, publication, removal, restoration and report is written to a public log with the date and the reason category. Businesses cannot remove a review, cannot see a held review, and cannot pay for any change to this process at any price. Where we withhold a log entry for a legal reason, the gap is shown.

7. Verified reviews and editor's reviews

A review is marked verified when it arrived through an invitation, our API, or a store integration tied to a real order. Verified reviews carry full weight in the score; organic reviews carry 0.7 of it. Both are shown. The formula is public on the trust page and is the same for every business.

Now and then a member of our team buys from or visits a business and writes it up. Those are editor's reviews. We pay for the experience ourselves, tell the business afterwards and not before, and no business can request, buy or remove one. They are signed by the team and carry the same weight as a verified review.

Reviews a business imports from Google, Facebook, Trustpilot or Yelp are shown with their source and never count towards the score.

8. Our content and the score

The site design, the code, the score, the badges and our own writing belong to us or our licensors. You can quote from the site with a link back. You cannot copy the site, scrape it at scale, resell its content, or use reviews to train a system that writes reviews. The score is a number produced by a published formula applied to published reviews; it is not our opinion of a business and it is not a recommendation.

9. Our liability

We provide the site as it is. We work to keep it available and accurate, and we publish the formula so anyone can check the maths, but we do not guarantee that the site will be available at all times, that every review is genuine, or that the score means anything beyond the formula applied to the reviews on the day. We are not responsible for the content of reviews, which is the responsibility of the person who wrote them, or for what a business does in response to one.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable to you for any indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, business or reputation, arising from the site. Where you have not paid us anything, our total liability to you for any claim is limited to one hundred pounds sterling.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, nothing here takes away rights you have under the law of the country where you live that cannot be excluded by contract.

10. Legal notices about a review

If you believe a review is unlawful, email email@thereviews.net with the review link, the specific words you complain of, and why you say they are unlawful. We acknowledge within two business days. We do not remove a review because a solicitor's letter asks us to; we assess it. A complaint of defamation that meets the requirements of the Defamation (Operators of Websites) Regulations 2013 is handled under those regulations, which may mean passing your complaint to the reviewer and giving them seven days to respond. A court order is complied with. Outcomes are logged.

11. Ending things

You can close your account whenever you like. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or the guidelines, and we say why. A suspended account keeps its published reviews unless those reviews were themselves the breach.

If we ever stop operating the service we give 90 days' notice on the site and by email, and you can take a copy of your reviews in that time.

12. Governing law and where disputes go

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction, for everyone except consumers living in the United Arab Emirates. If you are a consumer living in the United Arab Emirates, the law of the United Arab Emirates governs these terms and its courts have jurisdiction.

Wherever you live, if you are a consumer you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer laws of your own country, and you can bring a claim in the courts of that country. Nothing in this section takes that away.

Before either of us goes to court we agree to try to resolve the matter by email first. Most problems on a review site are a misunderstanding about a log entry, and those get sorted in a day.

13. Changes to these terms

Each version carries its number and effective date at the top. We announce material changes on the transparency page and by email to account holders 30 days before they apply. Continuing to use the site after that date is acceptance. If you do not accept a change, delete your account before it applies and nothing further is owed either way.

Questions to email@thereviews.net. Every document is listed on the Legal hub.