How owner reviews work
Reviews on MathBikes are written by people who say they own the bike. This page is the whole policy: what is checked, what is stored, who can see it and why a review might not be published.
What a review here is
A review is a statement by the person who wrote it. MathBikes does not test e-bikes, so it never says a bike was tested and never writes a rating of its own. The stars on a bike page are the average of the owners' ratings, nothing else.
Who can write one
Anyone who owns or has ridden the bike. Each email address can review each bike once. You choose the name shown with your review. Your email address is never shown.
From the form to the page
- You fill in the form: your ratings, how long you have owned the bike, and the review itself, between 100 and 4000 characters. A receipt is optional.
- We email a confirmation link to the address you gave. It works for 7 days. A review that is not confirmed in that time is deleted, with any receipt, no later than the next daily cleanup.
- After you confirm, a person at MathBikes reads the review, and the receipt if there is one, and decides. Nothing is published before that.
- You get an email with the decision and a link to delete your review whenever you want. Deleting it removes it from the site and from our database.
What the labels mean
- Email confirmed: the writer showed that the address is theirs. Nobody checked that they bought or own the bike.
- Verified purchase: the writer attached a receipt and the moderator looked at it and accepted it as proof of buying this bike. Only this label says a purchase was checked.
Receipts
A receipt is optional and is personal data, so it is handled separately from the review. A photo is re-encoded as a JPEG on our server, which drops the camera and location details; a PDF is kept as it was sent. The file can be at most 900 KB.
It is stored in a private folder on our server, outside the website's public files, under a random name. Only the signed-in moderator can open it. It is deleted when the review is decided, whether the receipt was accepted or not. We keep only whether it checked out, and when. If a deletion fails, the daily cleanup repeats it. Receipts are not part of our backups.
Why a review is not published
A review is turned down only for one of these reasons. Being negative, or giving a low rating, is never one of them.
- Nothing suggests the writer has owned or ridden this bike.
- The review was paid for, or written in exchange for a discount, a gift or another benefit.
- The writer works for, or is paid by, the brand or a seller of the bike.
- The review is about something other than this bike.
- The review contains insults, threats or hate.
- The review contains names, addresses or contact details of other people.
- The text is copied from another review, here or elsewhere.
- The review is advertising, or nonsense.
- The writer asked us to take it down.
The moderator is shown signals: a text that is close to another review, a measured range far from our estimate, or an email address at the brand's or a seller's own domain. They decide nothing. A person does.
Measured ranges
An owner may give how far one charge took them, together with rider weight, assist level and terrain. It is the owner's own reading, shown in your unit of distance and never presented as a MathBikes figure. A reading below 20% or above 300% of our estimate for that bike is flagged to the moderator before it is published; it can still be published.
Star ratings in search results
A bike page declares the average rating and up to 5 of its reviews to search engines only once it has 3 published owner reviews. Below that the reviews are on the page and nothing is declared, because one or two reviews make an average that a single person decides. Only owners' reviews are ever declared.
So far
No reviews are published yet, 0 with a receipt checked, 0 waiting for a decision.
No review has been turned down yet.
Your data
What is stored, for how long and who processes it is in the privacy policy. The emails about your review are sent through Brevo. A deleted review can remain in a database backup until that backup expires. To have a review removed, use the delete link in any email about it, or write to us through the contact page.