Last updated: August 26, 2026
The Race Scoop is built on real athletes telling the truth about real races, hotels, trainers, and gear. That only works if people can be honest without the site turning into a place where anyone gets attacked. Here's the line we draw, and how we enforce it.
The Core Rule
Honest criticism, disagreement, and negative experiences are always allowed. Tell us the hotel was a dump, the race was disorganized, the medic tent was understaffed, the trainer didn't show up. That's the entire point of this platform, and we will not remove a submission just because it's negative or unflattering to a business.
Hate, discrimination, harassment, and abuse are never allowed, no matter how a submission is otherwise written. The distinction is whether content is a genuine account of an experience, or an attack on a person or group.
What We Don't Publish
We moderate and will flag, edit, reject, or remove content that includes:
- Hate speech: content that attacks or demeans people based on race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or other protected characteristics.
- Discriminatory content: content that treats a person or group as lesser based on who they are, not what they did.
- Harassment: repeated, targeted, unwanted attacks on a specific person.
- Threats: any statement threatening harm to a person, business, or property.
- Bullying: content designed to demean, humiliate, or pile on to a specific individual.
- Doxxing or private personal information: publishing someone's home address, phone number, financial details, or other private information without consent.
- Fraudulent or fake reviews: a review of a race, hotel, trainer, or business you did not actually experience, or one submitted by the business itself pretending to be a customer.
- Spam: repetitive, irrelevant, or purely promotional content unrelated to a genuine experience.
- Impersonation: pretending to be another person, business, or The Race Scoop.
- Intentionally misleading content: claims you know to be false, presented as fact.
- Illegal content: anything that violates the law.
- Excessive or offensive content unrelated to the community: sexual content, excessive profanity, or material that has nothing to do with racing, training, or travel.
How Moderation Actually Works
Every review and submission goes through a status before it can appear on the site:
- Pending: the default status for anything newly submitted. Nothing publishes automatically.
- Needs Review / Flagged: an automated first pass checks for likely violations (the categories above). Flagging is a triage tool, not a rejection, a flagged item goes to us for a human decision, it is not auto-removed.
- Approved: cleared to publish, and where applicable, counted into a business's displayed rating average.
- Rejected: does not publish. We keep a record for our own purposes; it's never shown on the site.
An automated flag is designed to catch the categories above, slurs, threats, harassment, discriminatory language, not blunt honesty about a bad experience. If a genuinely honest, harsh review gets caught by mistake, our review step is what corrects that before a final decision is made.
Enforcement
We may reject or remove any submission that violates these Guidelines, edit content for length or clarity without changing its meaning, and suspend or restrict a user's ability to submit content for repeated or serious violations. See our Terms of Use for the full submission and reviews terms these Guidelines support.
Report Something
See content that violates these Guidelines? Tell us through the Contact page and we'll take a look.
