Reviews

What reviews are for, who can leave one, and what we do about the ones that are not honest.

Who can review

You can review a session you actually attended, for a meaningful part of its length. Reviews are not open to people who booked and did not come, and there is no way to review someone you have never had a session with. This is the single most important thing about reviews here and it is enforced by the booking record, not by trust.

One review per session. You can review the same person again after a later session with them.

What a review should be

Your own experience of the session. What you worked on, how it was taught, whether it was worth it.

What is removed

• Anything that breaks the community policy.
• Personal details about anyone, including contact details, whether yours or theirs.
• Reviews about something other than the session: a payment problem, a technical fault, a disagreement about scheduling. Those belong in a dispute or a complaint, where somebody can actually fix them.
• Reviews traded, bought, or left by accounts that exist to leave them.

If your review is hidden, you are told, and you can appeal.

Ratings

A professional's rating is the average of their published reviews, adjusted so that somebody with one very good review is not ranked as though forty people had agreed with them. The adjustment shrinks as real reviews accumulate. We do not publish the constant behind it, because it is a fraud control as much as a statistical one.

Reviews may be down-weighted rather than removed when they look coordinated. When that happens the review stays visible and simply counts for less.

The professional's reply

A professional may reply once to a review of them, publicly. They cannot edit or remove the review itself, and neither can we at their request.

Machine translation

Reviews are shown in the reader's language where we can. The original is always kept and is always what the review actually says.