Review policy

The short version

Reviews here are written by visitors to this site about suppliers listed on it. We read every one before it appears. We remove spam, personal information, and anything that is not about the business being reviewed. We do not remove reviews for being negative, and we have never written, bought, generated, or seeded a single one.

Why we do not show Google or Yelp reviews

People ask for this, and the answer is that we cannot do it honestly. Google's Places terms forbid storing review content, and Yelp's cap it at twenty-four hours. Ratings we are not allowed to keep cannot be sorted, filtered, or compared across a list of suppliers, which is the only reason anyone would want them here. Google's own search guidelines are also explicit that a site must not aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites.

So we collect our own, slowly, and we tell you exactly how many there are. A supplier page with two reviews says two. We would rather show you a small honest number and the federal billing record than a borrowed average we cannot stand behind.

Who may write a review

Anyone who has dealt with the business. You do not need an account. We ask for a name to sign it, roughly when you were there, and what you went in for.

If you are connected to the business you must say so. The form asks directly, and owners and employees are welcome to write. Those reviews are published with a visible label and are deliberately left out of the star average, so that the rating a stranger reads is the rating from strangers. Hiding a connection is against federal law, not just our rules.

What we remove

• Spam, advertising, and links to unrelated businesses.
• Personal information: full names of staff, phone numbers, addresses, anything about someone's medical care.
• Content that is not about this business, including reviews clearly left on the wrong listing.
• Threats, slurs, and harassment.
• Reviews we can show were written by someone with an undisclosed stake, on either side.

What we never remove

• A review because it is critical, low-rated, or unflattering.
• A review because the business asked us to.
• A review because the business advertises with us. No one does; there is nothing to buy on this site.

Suppressing negative reviews is specifically prohibited by the FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, and it is also the fastest way to make a directory worthless. Every moderation decision is logged with its reason.

What we never do

• Write reviews ourselves, or have anyone write them on our behalf.
• Generate reviews with AI.
• Buy reviews, sell reviews, or offer anything in exchange for one.
• Copy reviews from another site, or move a review from one business to another.

If you are the business

You can write a review of your own listing as long as you tick the box saying you own it; it will be published with that label. If you believe a review is fake, defamatory, or about a different company, write to hello@crutchdirectory.com with the page URL and what is wrong, and we will look at it. We will not remove it simply because you disagree with it, and we will tell you either way.

Listing corrections, including addresses and phone numbers, are handled separately. See how this directory is built.

How ratings are calculated

The average is the mean of every published customer review, to one decimal place. Reviews from owners, staff, and anyone else who disclosed a connection are shown on the page but excluded from that average and from the review count beside it. There is no weighting, no decay, and no hand-adjustment.

What we store

The review itself, the name you sign it with, and the answers you give on the form. For abuse prevention we keep a one-way hash of your IP address and your browser's user-agent string; we do not keep the address itself and cannot recover it. See the privacy policy.