Terms of service

Prick Advisor is a platform where businesses and tradespeople can anonymously share accounts of difficult customer interactions. It exists to give business owners a place to vent, warn, and compare notes about the customer side of a relationship that usually only gets reviewed in one direction.

The Site is not a legal service, a consumer complaints body, or a substitute for reporting genuinely unlawful behaviour (threats, harassment, fraud) to the police or another appropriate authority.

You must be a genuine business, sole trader, or tradesperson posting about a real interaction you personally had in the course of running or working in that business.

Posts must relate to business interactions only — a customer's conduct as a customer. Personal disputes, relationships, or matters unrelated to a business transaction have no place here and will be removed.

You must actively confirm, via the checkbox presented at submission, that your post meets these Terms before it can be submitted. Browsing the Site does not require agreement to post; submitting content does.

To keep this platform focused on calling out behaviour rather than exposing individuals, every post must not include:

• The customer's name, or any detail that would let a reasonable reader identify them by name.

• Any address more specific than town or city level. No street names, house numbers, postcodes, or landmarks that narrow down a location to an individual property.

• Contact details of any kind — phone numbers, email addresses, social media handles, or usernames belonging to the customer.

• Threats, incitement to harass, or calls to action against any individual, whether directed at the customer described or anyone else.

Posts that breach any of the above will be removed. Repeated or serious breaches may result in your account being suspended or banned.

Every post you submit must be a truthful, first-hand account of something you personally experienced in a business context. You must not:

• Fabricate an interaction that didn't happen.

• Exaggerate details in a way that materially misrepresents what occurred.

• Post on behalf of someone else's experience and present it as your own.

This is the foundation the whole platform rests on. A false accusation of bad behaviour is exactly the kind of harm this Site exists to call out, and we take it as seriously in the other direction.

Illustrative and seed content. To help the Site launch with something to read rather than an empty page, a small number of posts are created directly by Prick Advisor rather than submitted by an independent business. Every such post is:

• published under a clearly marked house account (visibly 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 drawn from industry sources, forums, and trade press, rather than being a single verifiable first-hand account submitted by an outside business.

Content marked this way is exempt from the first-hand-submission requirement in this section, precisely because it is disclosed as illustrative rather than presented as an independent user's account. It remains subject to every other rule in these Terms (no real names, no precise addresses, no contact details, no incitement). Anything not carrying both the house account attribution and the "Representative Case" tag is a genuine, independently submitted first-hand account and is bound by the truthfulness requirement in full.

You retain ownership of the content you submit. By submitting a post, you grant Prick Advisor a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, display, and distribute it on the Site (and in connection with promoting the Site, such as social sharing) for as long as it remains published.

We do not edit the substance of posts. If a post needs to change, we remove it rather than alter it — this keeps the record honest and keeps us out of the business of rewriting your account of events.

• All submissions are reviewed before publication.

• We reserve the right to remove any post, at our discretion, at any time — including posts that were previously published — if we believe they breach these Terms, the law, or our Community Guidelines.

• If a post is removed, it is taken down, not edited. We do not publish corrected or amended versions of a removed post under the same listing.

• Anyone can report a published post using the report function on the Site. Reports are reviewed by our team, and posts that accumulate multiple independent reports are automatically taken off public view pending review.

If you believe a post about you or your business breaches these Terms — including if you believe it's untruthful, misidentifies you, or discloses information it shouldn't — you can:

• Use the report function on the post itself, or

• Contact us directly at contact@prickadvisor.co.uk, explaining the post in question and the basis for your complaint.

We aim to review and respond to complaints within a reasonable timeframe. We may remove content, request more information from the original poster, or decline to act if we don't consider the complaint to be substantiated — but every complaint raised through the above channels will be looked at.

Posts on Prick Advisor are the responsibility of the person who submitted them. Prick Advisor is a hosting platform for user-generated content, not the author of the accounts posted here (with the exception of content clearly marked as a house account under Section 4, for which Prick Advisor is the author).

You agree that you are legally responsible for anything you post, including for its truthfulness and for compliance with these Terms and with applicable law. You agree to indemnify Prick Advisor against any claim, loss, or liability arising from content you submitted in breach of these Terms.

• The Site is provided "as is." We don't guarantee it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or available at all times.

• Posts on the Site reflect the personal accounts of individual posters (or, where marked, illustrative composites) and do not represent findings of fact, legal conclusions, or endorsements by Prick Advisor.

• We are not liable for losses arising from your reliance on content posted by other users.

We may update these Terms from time to time, for example to reflect changes in the law or in how the Site works. If we make material changes, we'll update the "last updated" date above. Continued use of the Site after changes take effect means you accept the updated Terms.

These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and any disputes will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

Questions about these Terms, or complaints about content on the Site, can be sent to contact@prickadvisor.co.uk.