Platform Rules

Prolific Tea is a community-owned review platform built by and for Prolific participants. We provide a space where participants can share honest feedback about researchers and their studies.

All content is user-generated opinion. We are not affiliated with Prolific Academic Ltd. or any researchers listed on the platform.

We display researcher names publicly. This is how accountability works - participants need to know who they're working for before accepting a study.

Researcher names on this platform come from information already publicly available on Prolific (study listings, consent forms, contact details). We do not scrape or collect data beyond what participants voluntarily submit based on their own experience.

Researcher opt-out: Any researcher may request their name be redacted at any time by emailing [email protected]. Upon a valid request, we will replace the displayed name with "Redacted Name" while preserving the review history under their Researcher ID. Reviews (participant opinions) remain unless they violate the rules below.

Reviews should reflect your genuine experience as a Prolific participant. You are welcome to:

• Share your opinion on study quality, pay rate, and communication.
• Report rejection experiences and how they were handled.
• Describe technical issues or unclear instructions you encountered.
• Praise researchers who run fair, well-designed studies.

Frame your feedback as personal experience, not as statements of fact. For example: "I felt the rejection was unfair" rather than "This researcher scams people."

All reviews and comments must be written in English, regardless of which language you use to browse the site. This is a hard requirement, not a suggestion.

The reason is practical:

• The moderator team only reads English and cannot evaluate content it cannot understand.
• Reviews exist to help the whole community make informed decisions, so everyone needs to be able to read them.
• Machine translation is inconsistent for subjective experience writing and can distort the intent of a review.

Content submitted in other languages will be removed. If English is not your first language, that is completely fine - a short, plain-English review is always more helpful than no review at all.

Reviews are permanent unless they violate the civility rules outlined below. We do not remove reviews simply because a researcher disagrees with the sentiment or rating.

Negative reviews that are honest, civil, and based on genuine experience will remain on the platform regardless of external pressure.

If a researcher contacts us demanding removal of a review, we will evaluate the content against our rules. The outcome depends on the content:

• Violates rules: The review will be removed (e.g., contains threats, doxxing, or racism).
• Civil opinion: The review stays. Disagreeing with a negative review is not grounds for removal.

We will never remove a review solely because a researcher or institution asked us to. This platform exists to protect participant voices.

The following content will be removed and may result in an IP ban:

• Racism and discrimination: Slurs, hate speech, or content targeting someone based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or other protected characteristics.
• Threats: Any threat of violence, harm, or intimidation directed at a researcher or another user.
• Doxxing: Posting private information such as personal email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, or social media accounts not publicly associated with their professional role.
• Self-reviews: Researchers reviewing themselves or coordinating fake positive reviews to inflate their rating.

If you're unsure whether your review crosses a line, ask yourself: "Am I sharing my experience, or am I attacking a person?" The former is welcome. The latter is not.

Every review has a flag button. If you see content that violates these rules, you can flag it for moderator review. When flagging, you'll be asked to select a reason:

• Spam: Irrelevant or promotional content.
• Abusive language: Threats, hate speech, or personal attacks.
• Fake review: Self-reviews or coordinated manipulation.
• Other: Anything else that violates these rules.

Flags are anonymous. Each review can only be flagged once per person - once you flag it, your report is recorded and you don't need to flag it again. Abuse of the flagging system (mass-flagging legitimate reviews) may result in restrictions.

Moderators review flagged content and take action based on these rules. The moderation process works as follows:

• Flagged reviews are queued for moderator review.
• Moderators evaluate the content against the abuse criteria listed above.
• Content that violates the rules is removed. Content that doesn't violate the rules remains.
• Repeat offenders may have their account banned from the platform.

This is a volunteer-run project. We aim to review flagged content promptly, but response times may vary. If you need to report something urgent, contact us at [email protected].