The directory, preferred partners, and ratings

The directory is how a business is found before there is a job to be found for. It is five separate things, and each is switched on separately — so what you can see depends on which ones are live for your workspace.

What is switched on, and when

Nothing here is on by default. Each piece arrives off and is switched on deliberately, in this order:

1. Preferred partners. Useful on its own, with no directory behind it.
2. Your public page. Everything else attaches to this, so it comes before all of it.
3. Attribution links, which need a public page to point at.
4. Directory search, which needs enough businesses in a region to be worth opening at all.
5. Ratings, last. They wait on the review and dispute process being ready to run, not just on the page existing — a published score with nobody to appeal to is not something we will ship.

If a section below describes something you cannot find in your workspace, it is not switched on yet rather than missing.

Who needs an account, and who does not

The directory splits in two, and the split is deliberate rather than an oversight.

Reading it needs no account. Anyone can open a published page or search the directory without signing in and without signing up. That is the point of having one: the link in your Instagram bio has to work for a stranger who has never heard of us, and a search engine has to be able to read your page or nobody finds you through one.

Being in it does. A page exists only because a business holds an account here and published it, and so does everything with an opinion in it.

| | Account needed | |---|---| | Reading a published page | No | | Searching the directory | No | | Having a page of your own | Yes — your own workspace, and you press Publish | | Rating a business | Yes, and only if you were their client on a real job | | Leaving a private note about a business | Yes, and only if you shared a job with them | | Replying in public to a rating | Yes — the business the rating is about | | Hiring somebody you found | Yes — a client signs in to start the job |

Nothing appears about anybody who did not put it there. A business with no account here is never rated, never scored, and never shown in search.

Search also stays shut where there are too few businesses to be worth searching. A directory below that line is worse than none, so a region opens when there is enough in it rather than on a date.

Your public page

Your page carries what you do, where you work, roughly what you cost, and your own website address. It is built from the brand you already set up, so there is nothing new to design.

Two things it deliberately does not carry:

• No email address and no phone number. Not hidden — not there. A public page with contact details on it gets harvested. People reach you through Cygnetree or through your own website.
• No price. You choose one of five bands instead, because your pricing changes with the job and a number published today would be wrong next month.

Saving your page and publishing it are separate steps. Nothing is readable by anyone outside your workspace until you press Publish, and taking it down again is one click.

Preferred partners

A preferred list is the set of businesses you already recommend, kept once instead of retyped into every email. Keep it private, or share it with a client so they can read it.

A shared list shows the facts about each business and nothing evaluative — no scores, no ratings. You are vouching for someone, which is your judgement to make and needs nobody's permission.

Making a shared list private again retires its link for good. Sharing it later makes a new one, so somebody who kept the old address cannot get back in.

Ratings from clients

Only a client who was actually on a job with you can rate you, and only once for that job. There is no way to buy a score and no way to ask only the clients you expect to be happy — asking selectively is against the rules here, and it is against the law in several places.

Every rating is checked before it publishes. You can reply in public to any of them. You cannot change or hide one, and neither can any other business — a score its subject could edit would not be worth showing.

The average is the plain mean of every published rating, counted once each, with no weighting for how recent it is, how much anyone paid, or who wrote it. It appears once you have three published ratings; below that the count is shown and the average is not, because one rating is not a reputation. Ratings that were held back or removed are excluded, and the reason is recorded.

Private notes between businesses

Businesses do not rate each other in public here. That is deliberate: competitors rating each other, and a note left in anger after a payment dispute, are exactly the failure modes that make peer-to-peer scores worthless everywhere they have been tried.

Instead you can leave a private note for any business on a job you are both on. It goes to them and stays there — never published, never turned into a score, never added to anyone's page. It is the place for the thing you would say on the phone and would not put in writing anywhere permanent.

Attribution links

Browsers no longer reliably tell a website where a visitor came from, so guessing is out. Make one link per place you put it — your Google listing, your Instagram bio, the card you hand out at a show — and every visit through it is counted against that channel with certainty.

The links are ordinary public addresses. They carry no password and open nothing a stranger could not already reach, so printing one on a card is safe.

Retiring a link stops it being offered and keeps its history. The visits it brought in are yours.

Businesses that are not on Cygnetree

You can put a business on your own preferred list even if they have never heard of us. It is recorded as a plain factual entry marked not on Cygnetree yet, and you can invite them from there.

What never happens is anything evaluative attaching to them. A business with no account cannot answer back, so no rating, no score and no review can name one, and they do not appear in public search until somebody claims the listing and proves it is theirs.