Site Rules (Updated 11/17/2008)

RateItAll is an online community designed to allow its visitors to find and share opinions on a broad variety of topics. In order to encourage an environment conducive to the good faith exchange of ideas and opinions, a number of common sense guidelines have been created. The following behaviors are off limits:

1) Cheating.  This includes creating more than one account, attempting to artificially inflate the rating or ranking of a particular item, attempting to artificially inflate the number of votes associated with your reviews, or any other behavior designed to manipulate a rating, ranking, or score.

2) Hate Speech.  Hate speech on the basis of race, sexual preference, age, or physical handicap will not be tolerated. 

3) Threats and Harassment.  Threats, menacing behavior, and harassment of other RateItAll reviewers is off limits.  Disagree all you want, but please be civil.

3a) Harassment of New Members.  At RateItAll, we love newbies.  Anyone flaming or harassing new members risks an automatic one week suspension (added 2/8/10).

4) Plagiarism.  Copying and pasting reviews from other sources is strictly off limits.  Your reviews here must be your own.

5) Extreme Profanity.  This includes content posted in reviews, profiles, user names, comments, etc.

6) Off Topic Posts.  Posting comments that have nothing to do with the item being rated.  (added 10/20/04)  This includes rating items with which you have no personal experience (e.g. "Who is this?") (Edited 4/11/06), as well as joke reviews of products or services.

7) Spam.  This includes messaging other users with unsolicited commercial pitches, reposting the same review repeatedly for multiple items, and posting blatant commercial pitches with no redeeming content (e.g. "visit my Pete Townshend site at www.mysite.com')

8) Calls to action (e.g. Requesting other users to vote down a certain item, boycott a store, etc.) (added 12/15/04)

9) Disparaging specific employees when reviewing companies, or disclosing personally identifying information such as email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, etc (added 9/23/05)(edited 9/27/05)

10) Discussing past, pending, or possible lawsuits against companies. (add 4/11/06)

11) Dealer's Choice.  Any behavior that is deceptive, obnoxious, or that threatens the spirit of community of RateItAll is likely off limits, and could result disciplinary action up to and including loss of posting privileges.

If you see anything that violates our site rules, please contact [email protected] or flag the post (coming soon).

Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to explain to everyone individually why a post was removed.  We also can't promise that there will be warnings for loss of site privileges.

To summarize, use your common sense and try to make the RateItAll community a better place with your activity.