Community guidelines

This is a place to show food you actually cooked and say what you honestly thought of a recipe. Post your own work, be decent to people, and keep it about the food. You keep ownership of everything you upload.

Community features are for adults: you need to be 18 or over to upload a photo, write a review, comment or follow other cooks. Anyone can browse and cook without an account.

• Photos of a dish you cooked yourself — the plate is the subject.
• Honest reviews and notes: what worked, what you changed, what went wrong. A bad review is fine. A useful bad review is better.
• Tips, substitutions and adjustments that helped you.

• Someone else's photo passed off as your cooking, or any image you do not have the right to upload.
• Sexual content, nudity, gore, hate, harassment, threats, or abuse aimed at a person or a group.
• Photos where a person — especially a child — is the subject. People can appear in the background of a table shot; that is different from posting a picture of someone.
• Anyone's personal details: addresses, phone numbers, workplaces, or private messages.
• Advertising, spam, link dumps, fake reviews, reviews traded for anything, or the same comment pasted repeatedly.
• Confident food-safety or medical claims. Say what you did; do not tell strangers how long it is safe to keep chicken.
• Anything illegal, or content designed to interfere with the site.

You own the photos and words you upload. By posting, you give us permission to store them, make resized copies for different screens, and show them on the site next to the relevant recipe — for as long as your post is up.

That permission covers running the site and nothing else. We do not sell your photography, we do not licence it to brands, and we do not use it in paid advertising. We are not claiming ownership of your cooking.

When you delete a post, we stop showing it. We may keep a record of the moderation decision, and copies can sit in backups for a short while before they age out.

Uploaded photos go into a queue and a person reviews them before they appear publicly. This usually means a short wait. It also means an upload may be rejected — most often because it is not food, is clearly someone else's image, or breaks the rules above.

Moderation is a judgement call made by humans and we will sometimes get it wrong. If we rejected or removed something you believe was fine, email hello@iwantsomefood.com and ask us to look again. We will, and we will tell you the outcome.

Use the report option where you see one, or email hello@iwantsomefood.com with a link and a short description of the problem. Email always reaches us. If someone is in danger, contact your local emergency services first — we cannot help fast enough in an emergency.

For content you own that has been posted here without permission, use the process in copyright and takedowns, which is faster because it goes to the right inbox.

We start with the smallest response that fixes it. Depending on how serious it is, and whether it has happened before, we may:

• hide or remove the post;
• ask you to change something and explain why;
• pause your ability to post for a while;
• close the account, for serious or repeated problems;
• report it to the police or another authority where the law requires it.

Deliberate harm — harassment, sexual content involving minors, threats — skips the gentle steps and ends the account.

Nobody can pay for a good rating, and we do not remove a review because it is negative, because a brand asked, or because we disagree with it. We do remove reviews that are fake, traded for something, off-topic, or abusive towards a person rather than critical of a recipe.

These guidelines sit on top of our terms of service. If you post recipes for us to publish rather than photos of your dinner, see creator terms. What we store about your posts is covered in the privacy policy.