Review Guidelines

Write about a job you held

A review here is a first hand account of driving for one carrier. You pulled their trailers, you took their dispatch, you cashed their settlements. That is the whole entry requirement, and it is the one rule the rest of this page hangs off.

Not somebody else's story. Not what a driver in the fuel island told you, not a thread you read, not a screenshot of a group chat. If it did not happen to you, it is not your review to write, and a moderator who cannot read the text as a first hand account will decline it.

Recruiters, dispatchers, office staff and mechanics who worked for the company can write too. So can an owner operator who was leased on. Pick the role that fits on the form.

What belongs in a review

Everything a driver needs to decide whether to send an application. Be specific. A number, a route, a week that went wrong: those are what another driver reads the page for.

• Pay. What you were told at orientation and what actually landed. Detention, layover, stop pay, whether the miles were practical or short. Deductions you did not expect.
• Dispatch. How loads came in, whether you sat, whether planners answered at night, how a reroute or a breakdown got handled.
• Equipment. Age and condition of the trucks and trailers, the shop, how long a repair took, whether an APU or an inverter came with it.
• Home time. What you were promised, what you got, and what happened when you asked.
• Owners and managers, in their working role. By role, never by name: the owner, the safety director, my dispatcher. What the owner promised at orientation, how a safety director handled a citation, what the terminal manager said when you refused an unsafe load. Their conduct on the job is the job, and the role carries all of it without naming the person.

Where it stops: the private life of a person at the company is not part of the job, and neither is a rumor about their family, their health or their marriage. Write about the decision, not the person's private business.

What we never publish

This is the whole list. It is the wording of the FTC rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, 16 CFR 465.7, which is the rule that makes it unlawful for a business to suppress reviews, and these are the narrow grounds a platform may still withhold one on. We apply the list the same way to a five star review as to a one star review, which is what the rule requires and also what makes the page worth reading.

• Trade secrets or confidential information.
• Defamatory, harassing, abusive, obscene, vulgar or sexually explicit content.
• Personal information of others, meaning the name of any person, phone numbers, plate numbers, social security numbers.
• Discriminatory content.
• Clearly false or misleading statements.
• Fake reviews.
• Unrelated content.

Two of those are worth spelling out, because they are the two that trip up honest reviews.

Confidential information is customer lists, rate confirmations, internal rate sheets and documents you were given as an employee. Saying the company paid you 28 cents a mile is your own pay and yours to publish. Posting their broker rates is not.

Clearly false or misleading is not the same as unflattering. A specific accusation of a crime needs something behind it: a public record, a citation, a document. If all you have is what you saw, describe what you saw and let the reader draw the conclusion. "They logged me over hours" beats "they commit federal fraud", and it is the version that survives a complaint.

Rejection is not a black mark on you. You get the reason and the message, and you can fix the text and send it again.

No contact details, no links

The form refuses a review that contains a link, a phone number, an email address or a social security number, in the title or in the body. You get a message naming the box to fix, and nothing is lost.

The reason is not tidiness. A phone number in a review is somebody's number, usually a dispatcher's, and a page that publishes it becomes a harassment tool the first time a review goes around a Facebook group. Links are blocked because a review site that accepts them is a link farm within a week, and because we are not in a position to vouch for where they point.

Name the company, name a job title, describe what happened. That carries the account without carrying a person's contact details.

One company, one review

You get one review per company. Worked there twice, five years apart? One review, and say so in it. Drove for four carriers? Four reviews, one each.

You can edit while a review is waiting for a decision, after a moderator asks you a question, and after a decline. Editing sends it back to the front of the queue. Once it is published the choices are to leave it or to withdraw it, because a review that changes after other people have read it and linked to it is a different review wearing the same date.

Withdraw one and you can write a new one later. Nothing about that is held against you.

If you own or manage the company, say so

Owners, managers, officers, recruiters and their families can write a review. The condition is that the review says so. The form has a box for it, and ticking it puts a public mark on the published review that tells every reader who wrote it.

This is 16 CFR 465.5, the FTC rule on insider reviews: a review from someone with a material connection to the business has to disclose that connection clearly. An undisclosed insider review gets declined under the code insider not disclosed, and an account that keeps doing it is terminated.

Nobody is paid for a review here, in either direction. We do not pay for reviews, we do not take money from a company to publish, hide, reorder or delete one, and buying or selling reviews is prohibited by 16 CFR 465.4. See section 05 of the Terms.

Driver and Verified driver

A published review carries one of two labels and nothing else. No name, no photo, no link to your Google account.

• Driver. The default. It says the author has an account on this site and wrote this review, and it claims nothing more than that.
• Verified driver: the author submitted a pay or settlement document that a moderator reviewed. Trucker Route does not confirm employment. Documents are never shown to anyone else.

Read that second sentence twice, because it is deliberately narrow. A moderator looked at a pay stub or a settlement sheet with the company's name on it. Nobody called the company, nobody checked a payroll system, and we do not tell a reader that you worked somewhere. We tell them a document exists and a person read it.

If you upload a document

A pay stub or a settlement statement with your name and the company's name on it does the job. Uploading is optional and a review is published either way. A rate confirmation is not one of them: section 03 above calls it confidential information, and asking for it here would have been this page telling you not to publish a document in one paragraph and to send it to us in the next.

• Black out your social security number, your bank details and your home address first. We do not need them and a moderator should not be looking at them. If they are visible we send the file back and ask for a redacted copy.
• Only a site administrator ever opens it. Behind a second factor, through our own server, and every single view is written to a moderation log with who opened what and when.
• It is never published and never shown to the company. There is no public link to it, and you do not get one either.
• It is deleted 30 days after a review is approved and 7 days after one is declined. Withdraw the review or delete your account and it goes at once.

JPEG, PNG or PDF, up to five files on a review and two per upload. The Privacy Policy has the storage detail, including the encryption and where the files live.

Small carriers hide more of your review

Most carriers in the FMCSA census are small. On a company that lists fewer than 10 drivers or fewer than 5 power units, the public page leaves out three things you filled in:

• the years you worked there,
• whether you are a current or a former driver,
• your weekly pay range.

The date shows as the month, without the day. Your role, your ratings and your text are published in full.

Here is why. On a carrier with three trucks, "current driver, 2023 to 2026, paid per mile, $1,500 to $2,000 a week, published on August 20" names you to the owner as precisely as a signature would. Revenge from an employer you still work for is the reason drivers ask for anonymity in the first place, and a rule that only holds on big fleets is not a rule. A moderator still sees everything you entered.

The form tells you before you send when a company falls under this, and the company page carries a line saying some details are hidden.

How reviews add up to a rating

A company page shows a rating once three reviews are published on it. With one or two the page is still there, still carries the reviews and still says how many there are. It shows no score: not on the page, not in the lists, not in search results. We do not hand one to a search engine either, because a score we will not print on the page is not a score we should pass to anybody else.

One review is not a score. It is one person, one year, one dispatcher, and printing it as "2 out of 5" turns an account of a job into a verdict on a company that may run two hundred trucks. Three is the smallest number that makes an average worth printing, and it is low enough that a carrier with six trucks still gets one.

A review older than two years counts half

A review published more than two years ago counts half as much toward the company rating as a recent one, and it carries an "Older than two years" badge so a reader can see which is which. Pay changes, dispatch changes, and the people running the office change. A page that weighs 2020 the same as this month is describing a company that no longer exists.

A review also counts half when the job it describes ended more than two calendar years ago. That one carries no badge. A badge announcing when your job ended would print, on your review, the dates section 08 hides on a small carrier, and on a three truck carrier those dates are a signature.

Half is as far as it goes. Nothing here deletes a review, hides it or moves it down the page. Every published review stays, newest first, at full length, for as long as its author leaves it up.

Your stars stay your stars

The overall rating you gave and the five scores under it, pay, dispatch, equipment, home time and management, are shown on your review exactly as you set them, however old the review gets. Weighting touches the company average and nothing else. The average is our arithmetic. The stars are your opinion, and aging them would make them ours.

What we promise about your name, and where it ends

Your name and your email address come from Google when you sign in. They are visible to site administrators and to nobody else. They are never published, never shown to the company you wrote about, and never sold. No employer gets them by asking, however the letter is worded, and paying us is not an option that exists.

An administrator opening the identity behind a review is the most sensitive action in this system, so it is logged every time: which review, which administrator, and when.

The limit is a valid subpoena or a court order. If a court with jurisdiction orders us to identify an author, we comply with what the order requires and nothing beyond it. We tell you before we hand anything over, whenever the law and the order allow it, so that you have the chance to respond. That is the honest shape of the promise, and any site that tells you otherwise is describing a legal position it does not have.

Everything a court would be handed is described in the Privacy Policy, including how long we keep the IP address a review was sent from.

Before you write about a company you still drive for

Your employment or lease-purchase contract may contain a non-disparagement clause. The Consumer Review Fairness Act does not cover employment or independent contractor contracts. Retaliation may be unlawful in some circumstances; talk to a lawyer or the NLRB.

That paragraph is the most important one on this page, so here it is in plain terms. The Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 voided the clauses that stop a customer from reviewing a business. Congress wrote it for consumer contracts. The agreement you signed at orientation, and the lease purchase agreement in particular, is not one of those, and a non-disparagement clause in it may still be enforceable against you.

Separately, federal labor law protects employees who act together about pay and working conditions, and firing someone for that can be unlawful. Whether it covers you depends on facts we cannot see: whether you are an employee or an independent contractor, what you wrote, and how you wrote it. We are not lawyers and this page is not legal advice. If you are worried, talk to an employment lawyer, or to the National Labor Relations Board, before you post.

Two practical notes. Reviews from former drivers carry the same weight as reviews from current ones, so waiting until you have left is a real option. And the small carrier rule in section 08 exists precisely for the case where a review would otherwise identify you.

How long it takes, and what a moderator can do

Reviews appear within five business days. That is the service level, not an average we hope to hit. If a review is going to take longer, you get a message saying so.

A moderator has these actions, and rewriting your words is not one of them:

• Accept. The review publishes and the company page goes live with it.
• Ask a question. A thread opens in your account, you answer, the review goes back in the queue.
• Decline. You get the reason code and a message. Fix it and send it again. After three declines on the same review the form locks and a moderator has to unlock it, which stops one text going around the queue ten times a day.
• Remove. A published review can come down later if a report or a court order shows it broke a rule.
• Hide, for as long as it takes to read a legal claim. Where a court is already involved and a claim names specific sentences, a review can be hidden while we read the papers. It is reversible, it is logged, you are told, and it is not a decision.

We never edit the text of a review. Not to soften it, not to fix the spelling, not because a company asked. If part of a review cannot stay, the whole review comes back to you and you decide what to do with it. An edited review is our writing, and it is also a review you never wrote.

We are also not obliged to publish anything, and a decline is not a judgment about you. Every decision reaches you in your account and by email.

If a review breaks these rules

Use the Report link under the review. You do not need an account, and the reasons the form offers are the seven grounds in section 03, plus a box for anything they do not cover. Leave an email address so we can tell you what we decided.

Employers start there too. Content Removal and Legal Requests sets out what we take down, what we do not, what happens to a legal threat, and where to send a subpoena or a DMCA notice.

Anything else about these guidelines, or about a decision on your own review: legal@trucker-route.com. We answer within five business days.