The best reviews are passionate and personal. They offer a rich narrative, a wealth of detail, and a helpful tip or two for other consumers. Here are some additional thoughts for conscientious reviewers.

• Personal experience: We want to hear about your firsthand consumer experience, not what you heard from your co-worker or significant other. Try to tell your own story without resorting to broad generalizations and conclusory allegations.
• Accuracy: Make sure your review is factually correct. Feel free to air your opinions, but don't exaggerate or misrepresent your experience. We don't take sides when it comes to factual disputes, so we expect you to stand behind your review.
• Review updates: Review updates should reflect a new experience or interaction with the business. Don't tell the same old story you've already told. If you'd like to add new insight to an old experience, just edit your review instead of creating a new update.

Business photos and videos should be broadly relevant to the business and reflect the typical consumer experience (e.g., what the business looks like, what the business offers, etc.).

If you post a photo or video that showcases a more unique personal experience with a business (e.g., your smiling group of friends at the bar, the fly in your soup), we may remove it from the photo gallery for the business, but it still may appear alongside your review if you write one about the business.

We know that being able to ask and answer questions from the community about a business is extremely valuable, but as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Here are some things to think about when interacting with other users via questions and answers.

• Be helpful: A lot of people will benefit from your questions and answers, so stick to questions that are also relevant to others, don’t ask loaded questions or make presumptions, and keep the tone civil and non-argumentative. A little humor is fine, but if you really don’t have anything meaningful to add, best not to say anything at all.
• Be specific: Although broad questions and generic answers may get a large response, they might not provide quality information you’re looking for. By adding more context and details into your questions/answers you’ll get more focused information and meaningful conversation. Also, keep your questions limited to the business at hand. Topics like “what is the best restaurant in town” are best discussed in Talk.
• Be clear: If your question isn’t easy to understand, it is less likely to receive any answers. Ensure your questions have as much detail as possible to get the best possible answers.
• Avoid: Answering a question with another question; this detracts from the original question and isn’t very helpful.

Don't be shy — use your account profile to let people know who you are and what makes you tick. Users want to read reviews from people they know and trust (not those with profiles that are empty or laced with inappropriate content).

Talk is a place for fun, open, and honest conversations about what's going on in your community. While it's easy to engage and post on Talk, take care with what you post since you can't subsequently delete it. A dash of common sense goes a long way. And since user trust and transparency are important to us, anonymous users who are disruptive to the community will probably be dealt with more sternly than those who stand behind their words.

Yelp has a handy messaging feature to keep you connected with your fellow yelpers. First off, please don't use this feature to harass other users or send other inappropriate content. Second, user accounts are for personal, non-commercial use only. Business owners should message reviewers using their free Business Owners Account. In order to do so, we ask that they upload a clear photo of themselves to help personalize their message.

Heard about a great event in the neighborhood? Great! Post it to the Events tab on Yelp. Please don't use Events to post your recurring promotional announcements and sales. We also like to keep the content fresh, so please don't post events more than 6 months in advance.

Business owners should be getting in on the act, too. Some words of wisdom:

• From the Business: You can use the "From the business" tab to tell people a little something special about your business. Please keep it relevant: don't use this feature to attack your competitors, reviewers, or Yelp, and don't use it to seed keywords or post special offers or promotions — we'll remove them if we see them.
• Public Comments: Direct messaging is often the best way to resolve a dispute with an unhappy customer, but business owners can also address issues publicly by posting a public comment. As with direct messaging, we ask that business owners upload a clear photo of themselves to help personalize their message. Don’t use public comments to launch personal attacks, advertise, or offer an incentive to change a review.
• Video and Photos: Videos are a great way for advertisers to promote themselves on Yelp. Be as creative as you can, but please keep it clean. We're not big fans of imagery showing violence, drug use, nudity, near nudity, or suggestive acts. Also, please don't use your video to disparage other businesses, users, or Yelp; request or solicit reviews from users; or respond to user reviews.
• Don’t ask for reviews and don’t offer to pay for them either: Please don’t ask your customers to review your business on Yelp. Over time, solicited reviews create bias on your business page — a bias that savvy consumers can smell from a mile away. Learn why you shouldn’t ask for reviews. You should also never offer compensation (discounts and freebies count too) in exchange for reviews.