Submission guidelines

A post here is a business's account of a genuinely difficult customer interaction — the kind of thing you'd vent about in the pub, written up properly instead. Late cancellations, abuse toward staff, chronic non-payment, unreasonable demands, the works. If it happened to you in a business context and it's true, it belongs here.

This is not a place to settle personal scores, air relationship grievances, or complain about other businesses. Keep it to customers, keep it to work.

This is the one rule that isn't negotiable. Every post must be written so the customer cannot be identified by anyone reading it. That means:

• No names. Not first names, not nicknames, not initials that would obviously identify someone in a small community.

• No precise addresses. Town or city is the maximum level of detail. No street names, house numbers, or postcodes.

• No contact details. No phone numbers, email addresses, social media handles, or usernames — theirs or anyone else's.

• No photos or identifying descriptions that would let someone pick the person out of a crowd.

A post that identifies a customer, even accidentally, gets pulled. This protects the person on the other end of the story, and it protects you — see Section 5.

Unlike customers, businesses aren't required to hide. You're welcome to post under your business name, and a verified badge (coming post-launch) will mark accounts confirmed against Companies House. Standing behind your account with your name on it adds weight to what you're describing — but it also means you're vouching for its accuracy. See Section 1 of the Terms of Service.

Describe the interaction, not your feelings about the person as a human being. There's a real difference between:

• "Cancelled twice with no notice, then disputed the callout charge for over an hour" — fine.

• Personal abuse, slurs, or attacks on someone's appearance, background, or character that go beyond the interaction itself — not fine.

Strong language about the situation is part of the tone of this site. Language that targets a person rather than their behaviour crosses into something else, and it's the kind of thing that gets a post removed regardless of how frustrating the customer was.

Posts must never threaten a customer, encourage anyone to seek them out, or incite harassment, retaliation, or any other action against them — online or in person. This applies even if you think the customer deserves it. A case file is a record, not a call to arms. Anything that reads as an incitement to act gets removed and may be reported to the relevant authorities where required.

Every post must be a genuine account of something the poster personally experienced in a business context — not something exaggerated for effect, not someone else's story told as your own, not invented. This matters more here than on most sites, because a false accusation of bad behaviour is exactly the kind of harm this platform exists to call out in the other direction. Full detail is in Section 4 of the Terms of Service.

Representative Cases. To help the site launch with something worth reading, a small number of posts are published directly by Prick Advisor rather than submitted by an outside business. Every one of these is clearly published under a house account (labelled as an official Prick Advisor account, not an independent user) and individually tagged "Representative Case" on the post itself — based on real, publicly reported patterns of customer behaviour, not a single verifiable first-hand account. Anything without both markers is a genuine, independently submitted account and is held to the truthfulness standard above in full.

Every submission is reviewed before it goes live. If something published later turns out to breach these guidelines or the Terms of Service — or gets flagged by enough independent reports — it comes down. We remove posts, we don't edit them: if a post needs to change, taking it down and letting the poster resubmit keeps the record honest, rather than us rewriting someone's account of events after the fact.

If you spot something that shouldn't be here, use the report button on the post. Posts that pick up reports from several different people are automatically pulled from public view pending review — nobody's account disappears over one disgruntled click, but a pattern gets looked at properly.

Think a post is false, identifies someone it shouldn't, or breaches these guidelines? Report it directly from the post, or contact us at contact@prickadvisor.co.uk for anything the report button doesn't cover — including takedown requests. We take these seriously and respond within a reasonable timeframe.