How reviews work

Who can review

Only people signed in to a SpicesBite account can write a review. Anyone can read them. Signing up needs an email address and password; we do not ask for proof that you have eaten at the place.

Reviews are not paid for or sold

We do not sell reviews or ratings, and we do not pay for them. Businesses cannot buy a better rating, and a business cannot remove or edit a review of itself. A review is hidden only by our team after a report, for the reasons listed below. We do not hide a review because it is negative.

How the rating is calculated

Each review carries a whole-number rating from 1 to 5 stars. The rating shown for a place is the plain average of the star ratings of all of its visible reviews, rounded to two decimal places, and the review count is the number of those reviews. Every review counts equally: nothing is weighted by how recent it is, who wrote it, or how long it is. A place with no reviews has no rating. A review that we hide is left out of both the average and the count.

What we check, and what we do not

We want to be clear about how little is automatic.

• We do check that a review comes from a signed-in account, that the rating is between 1 and 5, and that the text is between 10 and 5,000 characters. We also enforce two rules in the software: one account can post only one review of a place, and an account that owns a listing on SpicesBite cannot review that listing. Reviews appear straight away; we do not read each one before it is published.
• We do not check that the reviewer visited the place, ate there or paid. We have no link to bookings, receipts or payments, so a review is the account holder’s own statement and we cannot confirm it.
• We do not currently run automated fake-review detection. The two rules above only look at the account: nothing technical stops someone with a second account, or an employee or relative of a business, from reviewing it. Those are against our Terms of Service, but we find them mainly through reports.

What we remove

We hide a review when it is reported and we find that it is, for example:

• fake, or written by someone with a connection to the business;
• paid for, or written in return for a discount or other inducement;
• abusive, hateful, or naming private people or sharing their personal details;
• spam or advertising;
• unlawful.

A hidden review is no longer shown and no longer counts towards the rating. We keep a private record of the report and of what we decided.

How to report a review or a listing

Every review, and every listing page, has a Report link. Pick a reason, add details if you can, and send it. You do not need an account, but if you are signed out we ask for an email address so that we can tell you what we decided. We use it for that and for nothing else. You can also write to support@spicesbite.app.

What happens after a report

A person on our team reads the report and the review, and either hides the review or leaves it up. Either way we email the person who reported it, with our decision and, where we have written one, our reason. We cannot promise how long it will take; see Contact & Support for how quickly we usually reply.

If you disagree with a decision

If your report was not acted on, or your own review was hidden and you think that was a mistake, write to support@spicesbite.app, quoting the report number in our email if you have one. We will look at it again and reply with the outcome.