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As queer and trans people, we are often discouraged or disempowered from sharing our experiences honestly, especially when it’s based on subjective experiences or personal feelings. Our SQSHBook Team sees that and believes that authentically sharing our personal experiences can build community power and collective consciousness.

SQSH does not endorse any particular reviews, but serves as a messenger and platform for passing them along to the rest of the St. Louis queer/LGBTQIA+ community. Each Review reflects the personal experience and opinions of the Reviewer. We recommend weighing the pros, cons, and context of each Review before making a decision about whether to try a resource.

People come to SQSHBook to connect with community perspectives. We know that people won’t always agree, but we expect everyone on the site to treat one another and the platform with honesty and respect. We’ve put together these guidelines to help set the tone for discourse on the site - just in case.

Review Guidelines

We accept Reviews that...

• Provide relevant and valuable info to other community members who don’t know the Reviewer.
  • The best reviews are personal, passionate, and reflect your own experience. They offer a rich narrative, a wealth of details, and a helpful tip or two for other community members.
  • Secondhand reviews are allowed, but we prioritize firsthand / personal experiences.
• Provide context and reasoning for recommending or not recommending a resource. Reviews that don’t provide context could be welcome in the future as SQHSBook builds more features.
  • 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, so we expect you to stand behind your review.
  • Try to tell your story without resorting to broad generalizations or conclusory allegations.

We don’t accept Reviews that...

• Provide no justification or rationale for recommending or not recommending a resource.
• Publicize people’s private information (e.g. contact info, full names - unless you’re referring to someone who is commonly referred to by their full name).
• Demand payment, resources, or privileged treatment. Writing a review should be informative and meant to help the broader St. Louis community. You should not threaten to post or offer to remove a negative review as a way to extract payment or resources from a listing owner or service provider.
• Have a conflict of interest (e.g. posting a review of your own organization, employer, or competitor). Your contributions to SQSHBook should be motivated by what would most benefit our entire community.
• Are not personally written by the Reviewer (e.g. content copied from other sites or content written by chatbots or other AI tools).
• Repeat the same story or experience from before while posting as a new name or user. If you had a new experience or interaction with a resource, you can post an update to add new insight into an old experience, or edit your original review within 30 days of posting it (if you you include the same email or phone number in your new submission).

After accepting a Review, we...

• May add context or moderating comments surrounding a Review.
• Will not copy-edit the content of a Review. We will post what is submitted and let Viewers decide how much they will trust that Review.
• Allow the listing owner to provide one response to the review (if the resource has been claimed by its owner), but don’t allow additional back-and-forth.

If a Review doesn’t meet the above guidelines, we...

• Will contact a Reviewer who shared their contact info to have a follow up discussion about their experience. If they are open to revising or elaborating on their Review to meet the guidelines, we will reconsider posting it.
• Invite a Reviewer who did not share their contact info to email us at sqshbook@thesqsh.org with the subject “SQSHBook Review” to follow up about why we were not able to accept the Review.
• Invite Reviewers to share their experiences in other platforms where the review standards are more flexible, such as social media, Facebook groups like Queer Exchange STL , etc.