Community Guidelines & Reporting

01Who these guidelines cover

These guidelines cover everyone who uses Motar Space and the apps we publish for it — car owners, garages, and the people who work in them. They are part of the terms you accept when you use the apps, and they apply to you whether you are the person making a report or the person being reported.

They are about Open Line — the messaging built into the apps — and about how people behave in it. How we handle your information in general is set out in our Privacy Policy. This page is about conduct between users, and about exactly what happens when someone reports it.

02What we do not do

We do not scan, monitor or read the conversations people have in our apps. No software reads your messages to decide what you are allowed to send. Nobody on our team opens a conversation to look through it. Your chats are not reviewed in the background, and they never have been.

There are two exceptions, and they are the only two. The first is a report — the messages a person chooses to send us, described below. The second is a lawful request from a competent authority, which our Privacy Policy covers. Outside those two, your conversations are not ours to read.

03What Open Line is for — and what is not allowed

Open Line exists so that a car owner and a garage can settle one job between them: what is wrong with the car, what it will cost, when it will be ready, and what happened if it was not. Nearly everything the two sides need to say to each other fits inside that.

None of the following is permitted here, and this is the list we enforce. It is short on purpose.

Threats

Threatening to hurt someone, their family, their business or their property. Telling a customer what will happen to them if they complain, or telling a garage you will come and damage the place, is a threat — whether or not you would ever go through with it.

Harassment and abusive language

Insults, swearing, slurs, sexual remarks, or messaging someone again and again after they have asked you to stop. Arguing hard about a bill is fine. Turning on the person is not.

Scams and fraud

Asking to be paid into a personal account for work booked here, sending a transfer receipt that is not real, inventing a fault to charge for a repair the car did not need, or billing for parts that were never fitted.

Pretending to be someone you are not

Claiming to be a garage you do not work for, an agency, an inspector, or a member of our staff. We will never ask you for your password or a verification code in a chat — anyone who does is not us.

Taking the job off the platform

Asking someone to cancel the booking and deal with you privately, or moving a job that started here onto a personal number. The record is what protects both of you: outside it there is no invoice, no history on the car, and nothing to point at when the work is disputed.

Messages that have nothing to do with the job

Advertising, forwarded chain messages, or contacting someone once their job is finished about something unrelated to it. When the job is done the conversation is done — unless it is about that job.

04What happens when you report

You can report a single message, or the whole conversation. Open the chat, press and hold the message you want to report and choose Report; to report the conversation, use the menu at the top of the chat. We ask what the problem is, and there is room to tell us in your own words what happened.

This is exactly what reaches us, and it is the whole of it.

When you report a message

We receive that message, and nothing else from the conversation.

When you report a conversation

We receive the last five messages the other person sent you. Not your own messages — only theirs, and only the last five. We do not go back further than that.

What kind of message each one was

With each message we receive its type — text, photo, video or voice note — so the person reviewing knows a voice note was part of what happened instead of seeing a gap where it was. If a reported message was a photo, a video or a voice note, we receive it as well: the abuse is often in the recording, not around it.

What you tell us

The problem you chose, and anything you wrote in your own words, reach us with the report. That is your side of it, and the person reviewing reads it alongside the messages.

What does not reach us

Everything else. The rest of the thread, older messages, and every other conversation you are part of all stay where they are.

This part binds everyone, not only the person reporting. By using our apps you agree that when someone reports a message you sent them, that message reaches us — and that when they report the conversation, the last five messages you sent them reach us. This is the only way a message you sent leaves the conversation without you, it happens on exactly these terms, and it applies to every user alike, including whoever reported you.

05Who reads a report

A trained person on our team. They are sent what the report contains — the message, or the five messages, the type of each, and what you told us — and they work from that.

Software may sort what arrives and put the most serious cases in front of a person sooner. It decides nothing. No account is warned, restricted or suspended automatically, and the only thing that moves a case up the list is how serious it is — never how many reports there are.

If the report is not enough to decide on, we may come back to you and ask whether there is more you want to hand over. We do not go and read the conversation ourselves.

We do not tell the other person who reported them, and we do not show them your report.

06Reporting is not removal

Reporting something to us puts it in front of a person. It does not remove what you reported, and it does not by itself touch the other person’s account. We read it, measure it against these guidelines, and decide.

Sometimes the decision is that nothing here was broken. A blunt message is not an abusive one, and a disagreement about a bill is not a scam. A decision to take no action is not us siding with the other person. It is us holding everyone to the same line — which is the only thing that makes that line worth anything to you on the day you are the one being reported.

We do not publish a deadline for a review. A review takes the time it takes to be sure, and that changes with what was reported. The serious ones go first.

07A report freezes what it captured

When a report is made we keep a copy of the messages it captured, as they were at that moment.

Deleting a message afterwards does not withdraw it from a report that has already been made. Neither does removing it from your own device. If you sent something and it was reported before you deleted it, it is with us.

We say this plainly because most platforms do not, and because it runs in both directions: the person reported cannot erase what a report is holding, and the person reporting cannot take back what they chose to hand over.

We keep that copy for as long as we need it to deal with the report and with anything that follows from it, and no longer.

08How we respond

We choose the response that fits what happened, starting with the lightest one that addresses it: a warning, removing the content, limiting what an account can do in chat, or suspending the account.

Severity can skip the steps. A threat of violence or a deliberate scam does not get a warning first.

We do not run a strike count. Two messages that look identical can be a misunderstanding in one case and a pattern in another, and a published table would force us to treat them as the same thing. A person weighs it, every time.

09Misusing reports is itself a violation

Reporting exists to protect people. Using it as a weapon breaches these guidelines in its own right, and it is handled like any other breach.

Reports you know to be untrue

Describing something that did not happen, or reporting a message for something it plainly does not say.

Reporting a competitor to damage them

A garage filing reports against another garage to harm its standing, or getting other people to file them on its behalf. This is the one we watch for most closely, because in a marketplace it is the cheapest attack there is.

Volume is not evidence

Ten reports from one account are one report. Reports from several different accounts about the same person may bring a case in front of a person sooner, but they do not decide it, and no account is ever restricted because of how many reports have been made against it.

False reports also delay the genuine ones. That cost does not land on us — it lands on somebody who needed help and is now further down the line.

10Changes to these guidelines

If we change these guidelines we will update this page and the date shown at the top. Where a change materially affects you, we will also tell you in the app.

If anything on this page is unclear, ask us. We would rather explain it once than have you find out what it meant from a report.