Posting Guidelines

These posting guidelines are subject to change without notice, from time to time at our sole discretion. Please read them carefully as we reserve the right to remove reviews or other content, remove or lock listings, and deactivate member accounts.

Businesses: Please read our fake reviews, incentivised reviews and legal threat policies.

Basic Dos and Don'ts

Be detailed and objective
Include product identifying information such as model numbers, car badges, etc
Write clearly using accurate grammar and spelling
Don't abuse, attack or threaten anyone
Don't post personal details such as names, phone numbers or email addresses
Don't swear and don't SHOUT

Irrelevant content

If you're reviewing a business listing, be detailed about your experience with the business as opposed to commenting on the purchased product. In some cases, we may not accept reviews if we believe the main feature(s) of the service or product haven't been used.

Comments should be related to the review you are posting under and answers should be informative and be relevant to the question you are answering.

Overly positive marketing-speak reviews

Don't post reviews with overly positive or "marketing-speak" writing styles. Our content team has the final say on what is considered to be marketing-speak.

Personal attacks

Don't post personal attacks, threats or insults directed at other people. There is also no need to respond to personal attacks in a similar manner as your account may be removed too. Instead, report the content or the member using the site's flag icons at the bottom right-hand corner of posts.

Personal reprisals against staff or business owners

Don't post personal reprisals against staff or business owners. If your listing has been affected by a personal vendetta you should report the review to our content team using the flag icon and provide as much evidence as you can.

Intolerance and vilification

Don't post content that contains intolerance or vilification of other people's race, culture, beliefs, physical or mental conditions, gender, religion, age, etc.

Swearing

Don't swear! Whether the swear word is an acronym or you're using asterisks or the word is somehow misspelt but the meaning is evident.

Words like "crap", "damn", etc. are not considered swear words, but we do encourage professional language as this adds more value to your review.

Advertising

Don't post advertising in your reviews, comments, etc. This includes viral advertising, links, promotions, etc. Product recommendations are acceptable depending on the context.

Our content team has the final say in ambiguous cases.

External links

Don't post external links that are irrelevant or lead to unsafe/offensive websites.

Affiliation to the listing

Don't review a listing if you are affiliated with or were affiliated with it in the past. This includes past or present employees, family and friends of employees. Please read our fake submissions policy and don't risk your listing being penalised.

Pointless posting sprees

There is no reason to flood ieatwords with multiple comments, questions or answers that add no value to the discussion.

We reserve the right to remove your content in bulk and ban your account.

Multiple accounts

Don't create multiple accounts. You can update your email address in your account settings.

Review verification and requests for additional information

Our content team may run checks at their discretion to confirm if a reviewer has used the product or service they are reviewing. As part of these efforts, some members will need to provide additional information to confirm that they have purchased a product or are a customer of the service they are reviewing. This information is kept confidential as per our .

Reviews written on company provided devices

Reviews written on company provided devices such as tablets or office computers may not be accepted. Read more about this policy.

Legal threats policy

Removal Requests

We consider reasoned and polite requests regarding content removal. If you believe a review or other content should be removed for breaching our Posting Guidelines, infringing or violating someone’s rights or otherwise violating the law, you should report this by clicking on the flag icon under the posts. Be detailed and factual as to why you think the content needs to be removed. The more evidence you provide, the easier it is for us to make a decision. Although we won't be able to reply to every request, rest assured that we investigate every one of them.

Threatening requests

We take a zero tolerance approach to threatening requests sent to ieatwords and reserve the right to take any or all of the following actions:

Placing a large notice of the threat(s) on your listing.
Removing access to the Brand Management platform.
Locking your listing to any future submissions.
Publicising the legal threats and associated correspondence on your listing.
Passing on details of correspondence that appears to be an attempt to abuse our policies concerning removal to the ACCC.

Fake positive reviews

If it becomes evident to ieatwords that a business has been posting fake reviews for their listing(s), we reserve the right to take any or all of the following actions:

Placing a large notice on the listing notifying users of fake reviews.
Removing access to the Brand Management Platform.
Locking your listing to any future submissions.
Submitting the case to the ACCC.

We have a number of tools and procedures to identify fake submissions and reserve the right to impose these penalties on any business trying to manipulate our rating system. We also work closely with the ACCC and reserve the right to submit all our findings to them. Note that ACCC has fined a number of companies for fake review submissions.

The ACCC can issue an infringement notice where it has reasonable grounds to believe that a person has contravened certain consumer protection laws. For serious misconduct, the ACCC can seek court penalties. The maximum penalty is $220,000 for an individual and $1.1 million for a body corporate, per breach.

Fake negative reviews

If you have evidence that a negative review for your listing is fake, please report it using by clicking on flag icon at the bottom right-hand corner of the review. Provide as much evidence as you can to support your claims.

Claiming that our member's username does not match-up in your customer database is insufficient evidence that a review is fake.

We take a zero tolerance approach to competitors submitting negative reviews on other businesses and have very sophisticated tools in identifying such fake reviews. We reserve the right to take any or all of the following actions:

Placing a large notice on the listing notifying users of fake reviews.
Removing access to the Brand Management platform.
Locking your listing to any future submissions.
Submitting the case to the ACCC.

Incentivised consumer reviews

Incentives should only be offered in exchange for reviews of your business (its products or services) if:

Incentives are offered equally to consumers likely to be complementary and consumers likely to be critical, and positive and negative reviews are treated the same.
The reviewer is expressly told that the incentive is available whether the review is positive or negative.
The incentive is prominently disclosed to users who rely on affected reviews.

Last updated: December 5th, 2016