YourFirstLocal is a local business directory for Greater Houston. People come here to find a plumber, a taqueria or a dentist. Everything you can post — a photo, a business description, a review, a report about a listing — should help someone do that.
These rules apply to everyone equally: business owners, visitors, and our own staff.
What's not allowed
- Sexual content. No pornography or sexually explicit images or text.
- Anything sexual involving a minor. Zero tolerance. This is reported to the authorities and the account is removed permanently and immediately.
- Graphic violence or gore. Including images of real injury or death.
- Threats. Against a person, a business, or a group.
- Hate speech. Attacking people over race, religion, national origin, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.
- Illegal transactions. Offering to sell drugs, weapons, stolen goods, counterfeits or people.
- Instructions for self-harm, or content encouraging someone to hurt themselves.
- Harassment. Targeting a specific person, including through a review or a report about a business.
Legitimate businesses are not the problem
Plenty of lawful businesses sit next to a difficult topic, and they belong here like any other. Pharmacies, methadone clinics, addiction treatment centres, sober living homes, needle exchanges, criminal defence and DUI lawyers, bail bondsmen, gun ranges, smoke shops and liquor stores are all legitimate listings, and searching for them is a legitimate search. We check what a submission is trying to do, not which words it contains.
How we check
Every photo, logo and piece of text you submit is checked automatically before it is stored or shown to anyone. Images are checked before they are saved at all — if the check can't run, the upload is refused rather than let through.
Searches and questions are checked too, but more loosely: a search box is private and nothing you type into it gets published, so we only stop the small number of things that are seriously harmful, and we'll simply decline to help with an illegal transaction rather than treat it as a violation.
When the automatic check is unsure, the content is saved and a person looks at it. Being queued for review is not an accusation and usually nothing comes of it.
What happens when something is blocked
The submission is not stored and not published. We record that it happened — the time, the account, and a one-way scrambled form of the network address, never the address itself.
- Three violations and the account and network are suspended permanently.
- Some categories don't get three chances. Sexual content involving minors, pornography and gore uploaded as images suspend the account on the first occurrence.
- Where the law requires us to report something, we report it. For content sexually exploiting children this means a report to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, as US federal law requires.
If we got it wrong
Automated checks make mistakes, and a wrongly blocked listing is a real cost to a real business. Email support@yourfirstlocal.com and a person will look at it. Tell us roughly what you were trying to post and when. If we blocked something we shouldn't have, we'll restore it and lift the strike.
Reporting something you've seen
Every listing has a Report a problem link at the bottom of its page. Use it for anything that breaks these rules, and for listings that are wrong or closed down. You don't need an account.
Rate limits
Submissions are capped per account and per network. The caps are set well above anything a person would hit and exist to stop automated abuse. If you see a "slow down" message during normal use, tell us — that's a bug.
Related
The legally binding version of these rules is in our Terms & Conditions. What we store about you is in our Privacy Policy.