Community Guidelines

1. What this place is for

Someone is about to spend real money on a used machine and cannot tell whether the price is fair, whether that model year had the bad clutch, or whether that dealer is any good. Everything here should be aimed at answering that.

The posts that make this work:

• “I own one. Here is what it actually costs to run.”
• “That price is $3,000 over what they went for last autumn — here is a comp.”
• “Check the hours against the service records; the meter on these resets.”
• “I bought from that store. Delivery was two weeks late and here is what happened.”

Be the person you wanted to find when you were shopping. Disagree with the claim, not the human. Assume the newcomer asking an obvious question is about to be ripped off, and answer them properly.

2. Where to post what

3. The rules

1. Be useful or be brief. “This” and “+1” are what the upvote is for.
2. Say how you know. Owned it, worked on it, read it somewhere, or guessing — all fine, as long as you say which.
3. No harassment. No abuse, threats, slurs, sexual content, pile-ons or following someone around the site.
4. No deception. Do not impersonate a person, a dealer, a manufacturer or Throttle staff. Do not run multiple accounts to agree with yourself.
5. Disclose your interest. If you work for the dealer, the manufacturer or the shop being discussed, say so in the post. Once is enough.
6. Nothing illegal. No stolen goods, no VIN or HIN tampering, no odometer or hour-meter rollback advice, no emissions-defeat instructions, no facilitating a sale you know is fraudulent.
7. Keep it on topic. This is a site about machines. Politics and religion belong somewhere else.
8. Post in English for now, so moderation can actually read it. That will change as we grow.

4. Talking about dealers

Criticism is welcome. Criticism with facts is protected; invention is not.

A bad dealer experience is exactly the sort of thing buyers need to hear about, and we will not delete a negative post because a store complained. What we need from you is the part that makes it useful and defensible:

• Say what happened, when. “Bought in March, quoted $X out the door, invoice came to $Y with fees they had not mentioned.”
• First-hand or clearly sourced. A friend's story is a friend's story — label it.
• No accusations of crime as fact unless you can point to the record. “They rolled the hours back” stated as fact, when you are guessing, is defamation and it is on you, not us.
• No campaigns. Do not post the same complaint in six threads, and do not organise a review-bombing.
• Name employees only when necessary, and by role where you can (“the finance manager”), not by full name.

Dealers: you are welcome here. Answer the complaint in the thread — a straight reply from a store reads better than any marketing we could sell you. Do not use a personal account to praise your own dealership without saying who you are.

5. Other people's information

• Never post someone's home address, phone number, email, workplace, financial details, documents or photographs of them, even if you found it somewhere public.
• A VIN, HIN or N-number is information about a machine, and posting one is fine. Attaching it to a named private person, their address or their movements is not.
• Screenshots: remove names, phone numbers, email addresses and account identifiers before posting.
• Do not post a private message, a text thread or an email from a person without their agreement. A message from a business about a transaction is fair game with the personal details removed.
• If something about you has been posted here, email us and we will deal with it. This is the one category where we act first and discuss afterwards.

6. Spam and self-promotion

• No affiliate or referral links. Ever. Link the product, not your commission.
• No SEO link-dropping, no paid posting, no copy-pasted promotional blocks, no mass-posting the same link across categories.
• Sharing your own thing is fine in moderation — your build thread, your YouTube walkaround, your shop's write-up on a common failure — provided you are a participant here and not a visitor with a billboard.
• Selling belongs in a listing, not in a thread. A “what is this worth” thread is fine; a thread that is an advert is not.
• No AI-generated filler. Use whatever tools you like to write more clearly. Do not post bulk generated text you have not checked; it is obvious, it is worthless, and it is the fastest route to a cooldown.

7. Points

Points measure participation that helps other people. They are visible beside your name, they set your level, and they unlock a couple of badges. They have no cash value, cannot be bought, sold or transferred, and can be adjusted or reset when something is reversed — section 7 of the Terms of service is the formal version.

What earns points

What costs points

A badge may carry points of its own, and an administrator can make a manual adjustment — a correction, or an award for something the table does not cover. Every entry in the ledger records why it happened, so any total can be explained if you ask.

8. Levels

Your level is derived from your point total. Nothing is gated behind a level today; it is a signal to other readers about how long someone has been usefully around.

A genuinely helpful week — a thread, a few replies, a story — is around 30 points. The names are ours and may improve; the thresholds move only with notice on this page.

9. Badges

• BETA Supporter is the only animated badge on the site, and the only one attached to a purchase. Its terms are in section 12 of the Terms of service. If the motion bothers you, your operating system's reduce-motion setting stops it — the badge keeps its colour and loses every moving part.
• Helpful lands at 25 upvotes received, and 100 Points at 100 points.
• Badges can be revoked if the behaviour that earned them turns out to have been farmed, or if the content behind them is removed.

10. Gaming the system

A points system is an invitation to cheat, so here is the position plainly. The following will cost you the points, the badge and possibly the account:

• Vote rings — reciprocal upvoting, group arrangements, or trading votes off-site. Upvote points are capped at 50 a day partly for this reason.
• Duplicate accounts to upvote yourself, to agree with yourself, or to get around a cooldown.
• Volume for its own sake — one-word replies, threads split into five posts, stories padded out to trip the reward.
• Report abuse — filing reports you know are wrong, to farm points or to silence someone.
• Delete-and-repost cycles to re-earn the first-post-of-the-day bonus.

We reverse farmed points rather than argue about intent. If a genuine post of yours is caught by that, appeal it and we will put it back.

11. Moderation

What we can do, roughly in order of severity:

• edit a post for formatting, or move a thread to the right category;
• soft-delete a post or a story — it disappears from public view and the points it earned are reversed;
• reverse points, revoke a badge, or apply the moderation penalty in section 7;
• apply a cooldown to posting, story creation or dealer submissions;
• suspend or close an account;
• in the worst cases, refuse service and, where someone is at risk, contact the authorities.

Moderators are a small team and every action is logged. We aim to tell you which rule was broken and what we did — not a form letter.

12. Rate limits and cooldowns

Everything that writes has a rate limit, to stop a script from drowning the place. Beyond that, mistakes are handled with a cooldown ladder rather than a ban:

• The first 3 bad submissions in a rolling 24 hours cost you nothing. Typos happen, and a dead URL is not a crime.
• After that, each further strike in the window adds a block: 1h, 2h, 4h, 8h, 24h, capping at the last value. It lifts on its own — the exact time is shown in your account.
• Some rejections never cost you a strike, because they are not your fault: a site that blocks our crawler, a site whose robots.txt asks us to stay away, or a failure on our side.
• Accounts in good standing get more slack, and accounts with a history of bad submissions get less. The signals behind that are described in the Privacy Policy; there is no score shown to users, on purpose.

13. Appeals

Every moderation decision can be appealed, and appeals are read by a person who did not make the original call.

1. Email [email protected] with the subject Appeal.
2. Include the link to the post or thread, your handle, and what you think we got wrong.
3. We aim to answer within a few days, and we will tell you the outcome either way. If we were wrong, we restore the content and the points and say so.

Repeatedly appealing the same decision with nothing new, or abusing the appeal channel, ends the conversation.

14. Reporting something

Use the report control on the post, reply or story. Pick the closest reason and add a line of context — a report that says why is acted on faster than one that does not.

• Reports are confidential. We do not tell the author who filed one.
• Reporting something is not a vote. Disagreeing with a post is not a reason to report it.
• For anything urgent — a threat, a child-safety concern, someone's personal information posted — email [email protected] as well, so it reaches a person immediately.
• For a wrong price or a bad listing, use the report button on the listing instead; an accepted listing report earns points.

Related: Terms of service · Privacy Policy · Trust & data