Rating methodology

Who may rate

Rating requires a registered account whose e-mail address has been confirmed. An unconfirmed account cannot submit a rating at all — the check runs on the server, not only in the form.

Each account may rate a given stable once. A submitted rating cannot be edited afterwards; if it is wrong or abusive, it is reported and reviewed rather than quietly changed.

The scale

Every criterion is rated from 1 (worst) to 5 (best), in whole steps.

A criterion that does not apply to a stable — or that the reviewer cannot judge — is marked "n/a". That is not a zero and not a bad score: it is excluded from the calculation entirely. A stable is never penalised for lacking something it does not claim to have.

How the score is calculated

1. Within one rating, the criteria that were actually scored are averaged. Criteria marked n/a are not counted — neither in the total nor in the divisor.
2. A stable's published rating is the average of those individual ratings. A rating in which everything was marked n/a contributes nothing and is not counted.
3. Results are rounded to two decimal places for storage and shown to one.

Worked example: a rating with four scored criteria totalling 11 points averages 11 ÷ 4 = 2.75. A fifth criterion marked n/a would change neither number.

Paid placements and highlights never affect a score. They are stored separately from the rating values and the calculation never reads them.

What the "verified" mark means

A rating marked verified was submitted by an account whose e-mail address had been confirmed before the rating was sent. That is the standard check, and it is recorded on the rating at the moment it is written, together with the method and the date.

What it does not mean: nobody from this site has visited the stable, checked the reviewer was ever a customer there, or confirmed any individual statement. The mark is about the identity behind the rating, not about its content.

A moderator can additionally verify a rating by hand after a review — for example after contacting the stable operator. Those ratings record that different method rather than being presented as the same thing.

Ratings carried over from the previous version of this site carry the mark when the account that wrote them has a confirmed e-mail address. The old system, too, only accepted ratings from accounts that had confirmed their e-mail address. Ratings without a confirmed address carry no mark; that says "not established", not "failed".

Ratings from the previous site

The earlier version of this site rated on a 1–6 scale. Those ratings were converted linearly to the 1–5 scale used here, so old and new ratings can be compared and averaged together. The conversion is a fixed formula applied once; no rating was re-scored or re-interpreted by hand.

Abuse prevention and your data

To detect manipulation we store a shortened, irreversible technical signature alongside a rating — never your IP address — and it is deleted automatically after a fixed period. It is used to spot patterns of abuse and for nothing else.

Every moderation decision on a rating is recorded in an internal, access-protected log: what was decided, by whom and when. On request we can reconstruct the complete history of an individual rating from it.

The criteria: 36 in 4 areas

This is the catalogue the rating form uses, in full. Each criterion lists what reviewers are asked to consider.