We would like to apologize for the recent instability of our server, causing the site to be intermittently inaccessible. As many of you already may know, a dispute has arisen between a restaurant owner and an eat.fi reviewer. Since many types of media mentioned the incident, our traffic spiked considerably beyond its usual amount and crashed the site. We got everything working again as best we could throughout the day, but not consistently. This is an unusual situation, and we hope you bear with us if it continues for longer.
We will not go into the details of the dispute here, as it is being extensively discussed elsewhere, and it is our intention to remain neutral in this matter, focusing only on fair treatment for both parties within the context of our site.
Our policy regarding reviews written by our reviewers is as follows: We delete comments very rarely, but when we do, it is because we expect reviewers to refrain from writing inappropriate comments, or comments that go off-topic, which includes anything from racism and obscenities to accusations of illegality (not paying taxes, foreign objects in food–these are matters for the appropriate authorities or the courts, which we are not) to not actually having eaten at the restaurant concerned. In other words, we expect our reviewers to express their opinions like reasonable adults, based on an actual experience of the restaurant. However, whether those opinions are positive or negative is not our business; we take the task of maintaining our credibility very seriously and do not delete negative reviews simply because they are not what the restaurant owner would prefer to hear.
We also do our best to delete repeated reviews by the same person of the same restaurant (which is hardly fair), and reviews that give a restaurant the lowest rating possible on all counts but don’t actually explain what went so horribly wrong. We believe that if the food really was barely edible, the service unbelievably bad and the prices sky-high, there is a story there worth telling.
In the case of the restaurant involved in the current dispute, we have been receiving an influx of spam-like streams of “revenge reviews” (several very low ratings in a row, or by the same person, or commenting on the dispute) which we have also deleted with greater vigor than usual, doing our best to leave those which seem to be valid reviews. We feel that opinions regarding the dispute are not relevant to a random future customer’s (a tourist, for example) experience of this restaurant, in that it does not affect the day-to-day functioning of the place.
The only things that are really relevant as far as the content of this site is concerned are the food, the service, and the price. We will be sticking to that, with the intention of keeping eat.fi as fair and balanced as is humanly possible in order to continue to match up good customers with good restaurants for the benefit of all.
