No chatbot scripts, no canned replies. These answers were put together by the same people who moderate reviews, hand out stickers at meetups, and actually eat at the restaurants we list.
Five minutes of reading will save you an afternoon of clicking around. If you only read one section, make it this one.
Wherebly is a friendly guide to neighbourhood restaurants, built around real reviews from people who actually live on the block. Instead of a five-star ranking race, we collect honest notes, photos, and stories from regulars and curious locals — then our editors turn the best of it into weekly guides for 60+ cities.
Put bluntly: we want you to find a place you’ll return to three times, not one you’ll post once and forget.
Yes — the whole site is free for diners. You can browse every city, read every review, save unlimited places to lists, and write your own reviews without ever seeing a paywall.
Restaurants pay us on their side if they want an upgraded listing (menus, photos, event promotion). That money is what keeps the diner side ad-free and lets us pay our writers properly. More on that in the owner section below.
No. You can read everything on Wherebly without signing up — no tracking wall, no “register to see more”. An account only becomes necessary when you want to:
Click “Share a place” in the top-right of any page, or the “Sign in” link on a review card. We offer three sign-in methods: email + password, Apple, and Google. We do not use Facebook — on purpose.
Three concrete differences:
As of Issue №42 (April 2026) we have active community moderators in 64 cities across 19 countries, with another 18 cities in “soft launch” where content is thinner but growing. The full list lives on our Cities page.
If your city isn’t there: you can request it from the Cities page, and if 25 people request the same spot we start recruiting moderators within the month.
Eight answers that cover 90% of what people ask once they’ve made a Wherebly account.
Find the restaurant on Wherebly (the search bar accepts name, neighborhood, or dish). On the brand page, tap the big terracotta “Add a note” button. A review has three small parts:
Yes, any time. Open your profile → “My notes” → tap the pencil (edit) or the small trash icon (delete). Edits keep the original posting date but show a small “edited” tag. Deleted reviews are gone for good after 14 days — we hold them briefly in case you change your mind.
A good Wherebly note is specific, personal, and short. Our moderators look for three things:
The best reviews we get are about 50–80 words. Longer is fine for bigger nights out.
Every diner gets unlimited Lists. A list is just a named bucket of places — “Rainy Sunday lunches”, “Anniversary picks”, “Tokyo homework” — that you can keep private or make public with a short share URL.
Public lists show up on your profile and can be followed by others. You can also co-author a list with up to 5 friends, which is popular for group trips.
Not entirely anonymous — but you can review under a display name (“RamenDad42”) without showing your real first name publicly. Moderators still see your verified first name + city so they can reach out if a review is flagged.
Fully anonymous reviews are one of the main ways fake listings happen, so we don’t allow them. It’s the one area where we’ve been firm since day one.
A small percentage of reviews (around 4%) get flagged by our moderation system as “unusual pattern” — for example, a brand-new account writing a rave about an obscure restaurant. In those cases only, we’ll ask you for a receipt photo as a one-time verification. We blur prices and any personal info before a moderator sees it.
If you don’t want to verify, the review stays in a “pending” state and won’t count toward the restaurant’s public notes — but you can still see it on your own profile.
You can type:
The search is city-scoped by default (wherever you last browsed) but you can switch with the small globe icon on the right. We don’t do typo-tolerant fuzz yet — if nothing comes up, try a shorter query.
A little, but only when you ask. On your profile there’s a “Might be your table” drawer — it looks at places you’ve saved or praised and suggests six similar spots in the current city. We don’t push algorithmic recommendations into your homepage or notifications.
If you ever want to turn this off entirely: Settings → Privacy → uncheck “Use my notes for suggestions”. Your notes still stay public; they just aren’t fed into the engine.
The short version of our For Restaurants page — without the pricing table plates.
Find your restaurant on Wherebly, open its brand page, and click “Claim this listing” in the sidebar. You’ll verify in one of three ways:
Claims are reviewed within 48 hours on weekdays.
More than you’d expect. On the free plan you get:
You can run a small restaurant on Wherebly entirely free. Most do.
No, and that’s the deal. An owner can flag a review for moderation on three grounds: factual error (wrong dish, wrong date), staff abuse, or being written by a competitor. A moderator reads the flag within 48 hours and either removes the review (if it breaks our rules) or keeps it up with a note explaining why.
Simply disliking a review is not a ground for removal. You can always post a public reply underneath it — we strongly recommend calm, short, human replies.
Table Plus ($29/month per location) unlocks your full menu with photos, event scheduling, story submissions to our editors, and a monthly booked call with a city moderator. Table Group ($79/month up to 6 locations) adds multi-site analytics, bulk menu editing, and API access for POS integrations.
All major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Amex), Apple Pay, Google Pay, and SEPA direct debit for European owners. We’re piloting local bank transfer in Thailand, Indonesia, and Brazil through 2026.
Invoices come monthly. VAT and local tax are applied automatically based on your registered business address.
Yes. Go to Dashboard → Billing → Pause or Cancel. Pausing freezes billing and keeps your listing on the free plan. Cancelling ends the month in progress, doesn’t refund the current month, and returns your listing to the free plan at period end.
No exit fees, no locked contracts. We sell with a handshake.
Three rules we share with every owner who signs up:
Owners who reply within 48 hours keep 31% more saved-lists than owners who stay silent.
We take privacy seriously — partly because we believe in it, partly because our moderators would quit if we didn’t.
Profile → Settings → Display name. You can change it twice per 90 days. Your old handle becomes available for re-use after 30 days (so nobody can impersonate you the day after).
Your verified first name + city pair can only be changed by writing to hello@wherebly.com — that keeps bad-faith account swapping out.
On the sign-in page, click “Forgot it.” We’ll send a one-time link to your email — valid for 30 minutes. If the email doesn’t arrive within 5 minutes, check spam, then write to hello@wherebly.com with the date and last four characters of the email on file.
We never send passwords in emails. Ever.
Yes. Settings → Privacy → “Download my notebook.” You get a ZIP with: every review you’ve written (JSON + Markdown), every photo you uploaded (original resolution), your saved lists (CSV), and your follow graph. It’s usually delivered in under 10 minutes, but we promise under 72 hours.
Settings → Privacy → Delete account. You’ll be asked to confirm twice and enter a short reason (optional, but helps us improve). After confirmation:
If you want your reviews removed entirely rather than anonymized, tell us in the reason field — we’ll do it.
No, and there’s no clever loophole. We don’t run ads on the site. We don’t sell your email, your reviews, or your browsing data. The only third parties that ever see part of your data are:
The full list lives in our Privacy Policy, which is written in plain English.
On any profile, tap the three-dot menu → Mute (you won’t see them, they’ll still see you) or Block (neither side sees the other). Blocks are silent — the other person isn’t notified.
If someone is being genuinely harmful, also press the flag on one of their reviews. That lands on a moderator’s desk within the hour.
Moderation is where most communities get cynical. Here’s exactly how ours works.
Real humans, 4–12 per city, who live in that city full-time. They’re volunteers paid a small monthly stipend ($60/month plus meal credits) and are nominated by existing moderators. We have 412 moderators worldwide as of April 2026.
Each moderator has a public profile with their handle, city, and how many flags they’ve handled. No secret moderation team.
Six things, and only these six:
Strong negative reviews stay up. Honest criticism is the whole point.
Yes. Every hidden review sends you an email with a specific reason and a link to appeal. Appeals go to a different moderator than the one who hid it (and to our editorial team if it’s a second appeal). Most appeals are resolved in 48 hours.
About 22% of appeals overturn the original decision. We publish that number publicly on our transparency page each quarter.
Three layers:
No pure algorithmic removal. A human always makes the call.
Tap the small flag icon on the review. You’ll be asked for a reason (the six above). If you give a one-line note explaining why, it reaches a moderator faster. You won’t be identified to the author of the review; flags are private.
Short version for anyone who wants to write for Wherebly Stories.
Email pitches@wherebly.com with the subject line “[City] — [Working title]”. In the body, give us:
You’ll hear back inside 10 business days. We accept about 1 in 6 pitches; editors write back to every single one.
$300 for short pieces (600–900 words), $500 for mid-length (1,200–1,800 words), $800 for features (2,500+ words with reporting). We pay on acceptance, not publication, in 14 days via Wise or Stripe Connect.
No. Most of our best stories come from people who aren’t: a dentist in Lisbon, a lawyer in Bangkok, a bus driver in Osaka. We care about voice and specific knowledge of a place, not credentials.
If you can write one paragraph that makes us want to book a flight, we want to talk to you.
No. You can use AI for transcription, spell-check, or brainstorming — we’re not the police — but the final voice of a Wherebly story needs to be a person’s, and you’ll sign a short declaration saying so. We run every piece through a detector as a last step before publication.
Absolute no. This is one of our three un-crossable lines, along with “no ads” and “no hidden critical reviews”. A paid story is not a Wherebly story — it’s an ad, and we don’t run those. Our editorial is funded by owner plans and a small seed round, not by coverage buys.
If it didn’t make it here, email hello@wherebly.com with a screenshot — we respond fast.
Usually a cookie on your browser. Try, in order:
If none of that works, write us — include your browser, OS, and roughly when it started.
Known issue with some iPhone HEIC files and older Android cameras. Workaround: on the upload step, tap “Rotate” once, then save. We’re rolling out automatic EXIF-aware handling through April 2026.
Most map issues come from ad-blockers blocking our tile provider (we use OpenMapTiles). Add wherebly.com to your blocker’s allow list, or try another browser. We’re exploring a self-hosted tile fallback for 2026.
Two things to check:
Corporate Gmail/Outlook sometimes quarantines our weekly digest — ask your IT to whitelist our sending domain.
Not yet in the app stores — the website is fully installable as a Progressive Web App. On iOS: Safari → Share → “Add to Home Screen”. On Android: Chrome → three-dot menu → “Install app”.
A native app is on our 2026 roadmap but only if we can do it without adding tracking. No promises on timing.
Last incident: 2026-02-17 (18-minute search outage). Full timeline on status.wherebly.com.
The part that makes the rest make sense — monthly dinners, moderator badges, and city leads.
Every active city has a monthly Long Table — a low-key dinner at a rotating restaurant, usually 12–20 diners, mostly moderators and anyone who signs up in time. RSVPs open on the 1st of the month in your city page.
Bring cash for your share of the bill; nothing is comped. We’re a community, not a freeloader list.
You can’t apply. You get nominated by an existing moderator in your city after they’ve met you at a meetup or been impressed by your reviews. We never accept external applications — it’s one of the ways bad actors try to get in.
If you want in, the path is: write great notes, show up to a Long Table, be kind, wait a few months.
The city lead is one moderator per city who runs the monthly meetup, edits the city page, and reviews major complaints. They get an extra $90/month stipend and a dedicated inbox. You can see who your city lead is at the bottom of your Cities page.
No — on purpose. We’ve tried both and they both drift toward either silence or pile-ons. What we have instead is community.wherebly.com, a slow-forum with threaded posts, where the best content gets pulled into Stories.
If you want fast chat, the monthly dinner is the answer.
Most are coined internally, all are written down here once so we all use them the same way.
We read every message — the team is small (17 people), so the reply may not be instant, but it will be human.
Account stuff, privacy requests, or just saying hi. Average reply in 4 hours on weekdays.
hello@wherebly.comClaims, billing, dashboard bugs, or plan questions. We keep this inbox separate so it moves faster.
owners@wherebly.comRegulars often reply within an hour. Great for “what should I eat in Lisbon” style questions.
community.wherebly.comSend a two-paragraph pitch. Our editors reply to every one, usually inside 10 working days.
pitches@wherebly.comIf nothing above solved it, write to us and tell us what you searched for. Every dead-end search gets added to this page the next week. That’s how this page got to 142 answers — by people like you telling us what was missing.