Community Guidelines

Rate My City only works if its reviews are honest and specific. These guidelines describe what we expect from a review or listing, and how moderation works. They apply alongside our Terms of Service.

What makes a good review

• Based on firsthand experience living in, working in, or visiting the city.
• Specific — what you rated well or poorly, and why, for each category you scored.
• Your own honest opinion, not written on behalf of a business, government body, or campaign.
• Free of another named private individual's personal information.

What gets rejected or removed

• Fake or incentivized reviews — never visited/lived there, paid or traded for, or posted to inflate/deflate a score for reasons unrelated to genuine experience.
• Defamation or harassment — false statements of fact about identifiable people or businesses, or content meant to harass rather than inform.
• Hate speech or slurs — targeting a protected characteristic (race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc).
• Doxxing — home addresses, phone numbers, or other private information about a named individual.
• Spam or off-topic content — advertising, unrelated links, or content not actually about the city being reviewed.
• Duplicate or bulk submissions — the same review resubmitted, or many reviews from a coordinated source, to manipulate a score.
• Undisclosed conflicts of interest — a vendor, city official, or their employee reviewing their own city or a competitor's without disclosing the relationship.

How moderation works

Every review, vendor listing, and vendor claim starts in a pending status and is invisible to the public. Our moderators check it against these guidelines and either approve it (it becomes public and, for reviews, its scores factor into the city's computed average) or reject it (it stays private and isn't counted). A city's overall and per-category scores are always the live average of approved review scores — nobody at Rate My City sets or edits a score by hand.

We may also remove previously approved content that's later found to violate these guidelines, or in response to a legal request (see DMCA process).

Vendor listings and claims

Anyone can submit a vendor listing for a city; it goes through the same pending/approved moderation queue as reviews. A business or tourism board can then submit a claim on its listing to manage it directly — claims are moderated before approval, and approval requires an active paid subscription (see Terms of Service) before self-service content (coupons, discounts, ads) can be published on the listing.

Appeals

If your review or listing was rejected and you think that was a mistake, contact us at contact@ratemycity.app with the city and approximate submission time so we can locate it.