Content Guidelines

PlateRate allows users to contribute different kinds of content, including reviews, photos, and more. We know you know how to behave properly, but just in case, we’ve put together these general guidelines. Please also read the guidelines below for specific types of content that you might contribute to the site.

• Only rate what you ate: Only rate menu items you have actually tried yourself. Ratings based on anecdotes from other are not permitted. Write from your own experience. As we create relationships with restaurants and people buy menu items from us, we will be able to validate that a rater actually purchased a menu item, unlike any other review site on the internet.
• Inappropriate content: Colorful language and imagery is fine, but there's no need for threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, and other displays of bigotry.
• Conflicts of interest: Your contributions should be unbiased and objective. For example, you shouldn’t write reviews of your own business or employer, your friends’ or relatives’ business, your peers or competitors in your industry, or businesses in your networking group. Business owners should not ask customers to write reviews.
• Promotional content: Unless you're using your Business Owners Account to add content to your business's profile page, we generally frown upon promotional content. Let's keep the site useful for consumers and not overrun with commercial noise from every user.
• Relevance: Please make sure your contributions are relevant and appropriate to the forum.
• Privacy: Don’t publicize other people’s private information. Please don’t post close-up photos or videos of other patrons without their permission, and please don’t post other people’s full names unless you’re referring to service providers who are commonly identified by or commonly share their own full names.
• Intellectual property: Don’t swipe content from other sites or users. Write your own reviews and take your own photos and videos, please!
• Demanding payment: Beyond simply asking for a refund to remedy a bad experience, you should not use removing or posting your review as a way to extract payment from a business, regardless of whether you’ve been a customer.