The board is not huge and it is not trying to be. What is on it is first-hand and written by members, which makes weighing a review the part that matters rather than finding one. Three things separate a review that tells you something from a review that tells you nothing.
Check the date before anything else. A glowing review from four years ago describes a business that may not exist in the same form — people change cities, agencies, schedules, rates and phone numbers, and some stop entirely and let the listing sit.
This matters most in the smaller cities. Ottawa and Vancouver have fewer reviews per provider than Toronto, which means the ones that exist are older on average, which means the date is doing more work.
A member with two hundred posts and reviews spread across several cities is a different proposition from an account created last week whose only post is a rave.
We do not delete the second kind. Everybody has a first review, and a new account is not evidence of anything on its own. But the post count is displayed next to every review for a reason, and it is the fastest signal on the page.
The same logic runs the other way. A single furious review from an account with no history is as likely to be a dispute about something else as it is to be a warning.
This is the one that actually decides it. A review that describes the shape of the thing — how the messages went, whether the listing matched the person, whether the location was what was described, whether the time was honoured — is worth ten reviews that say she was lovely.
Vagueness is the common tell for both failure modes. Fabricated positives are vague because the writer was not there. Score-settling negatives are vague because the specifics would not support the conclusion. Detail is hard to fake in either direction.
A useful habit: read three reviews of the same person rather than one, and notice what they agree about. Agreement on specifics is close to proof. Agreement on adjectives is worth nothing.
If you are writing rather than reading, the same three rules invert into advice. Post while it is recent. Describe what happened rather than how you felt about it. And include the boring logistics — communication, punctuality, whether the photographs were current — because that is the part the next person actually needs.