IT Central Station is a community that is built on trust, honesty, integrity, and respect of its members. This is the culture, the ethos, and the essence of IT Central Station. These core elements are integral to the weight and credibility of information found on our website. Without them, the information contained on IT Central Station simply wouldn’t offer any meaningful value to our community. Thus, all users of IT Central Station agree to abide by these core elements as noted in the IT Central Station Terms of Service & Community Guidelines.
In the spirit of full transparency, and before any information is published on IT Central Station, we require all review authors to disclose their relationship to the product, the service, or the solution about which they are providing information.
IT Central Station also has the following measures in place to help preserve information credibility and content integrity:
1. Our reviews will help you make the most informed decision.
At IT Central Station we pride ourselves on the length and quality of our reviews. You won’t see a review that is just a couple of words or a simple star rating without an explanation. Compared to our competitors, who publish reviews that are generally several hundred words long, our reviews are thousands of words long and contain the crucial content you are looking for to help you make your decision. We encourage our reviewers to go into detail about the cons as well as the pros of each solution they review so that you have the full picture before you move ahead with the purchasing process.
2. All user reviews must come from real, relevant users.
All user reviews must come from real users who have used the product/service, or have evaluated it for the purpose of using it for their company, in the past 12 months. Consultants and analysts can also submit reviews as long as they are not being paid by a vendor to write the review. Posts that are suspected to be insincere in any way will not be approved. If we cannot clearly determine that the review is from a real user, then we err on the side of caution and the review is not published. We’d rather have one fewer review in our system and sleep well at night knowing that all of the reviews published on IT Central Station are authentic and relevant for our user community.
3. Vendors must identify themselves.
IT Central Station facilitates discussion and the sharing of ideas in a vendor-neutral environment. However, we recognize that it is in a vendor’s interest to win over potential customers, and thus, contributions of a vendor can be inherently biased. For this reason, we require employees of tech vendors to identify themselves during registration. We feel that it is important that site visitors be able to distinguish between information contributed by vendors versus that contributed by tech professionals. In the event that a vendor attempts to circumvent or abuse the system, we reserve the right to put a red badge on the vendor’s page stating that the vendor has been suspected of planting false reviews. We believe vendors will see the risk of this happening to outweigh the potential gain from a fake review.
4. Every registered user must be verified.
We require all users to register either with their LinkedIn profile or their company email address. This requirement enables us to prevent vendors or other non-users from posting fake reviews. This verification process allows us to put measures in place to identify suspicious users and/or fraudulent posts. The validation process, combined with active community moderation and our commitment to review every post, allows us to have confidence in our information. If we cannot clearly determine from someone’s LinkedIn profile that he/she is a real user, then the person’s profile is flagged for additional follow-up, including direct contact.
5. Every registered user gets a badge.
To help make the information source “clear and conspicuous,” we badge every registered user with one of the following:
- Real User
- Vendor
- Reseller
- Consultant
- Analyst
- Community Manager
- Media
6. Every review comes with a disclosure.
A clear and conspicuous disclosure is published with every review.
- Disclosure: I am a real user and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
- Disclosure: I have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
- Disclosure: IT Central Station contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor. The vendor cannot approve or edit the review. Only the reviewer can edit the review.
7. We monitor the community and encourage you to help us by flagging any content that may seem inappropriate.
IT Central Station uses commercially reasonable measures to monitor content posted by members. We also encourage community members to notify us if content is deemed inappropriate or offensive. Beneath each and every review is an “Inappropriate?” link that enables community members to flag a potentially suspect review.
If content is flagged by our community managers or by a member of the IT Central Station community, we will moderate that content based on IT Central Station’s Community Guidelines, Terms of Use, and Privacy Policy.
IT Central Station commits to providing content-rich reviews by real users that are honest, authentic, and useful in making the best decisions for your company.
