Review Guidelines

Last updated: September 2, 2026

DamnPropFirms exists to give futures traders the real picture of every prop firm we list — the payouts that landed, the rules that hurt, the support that showed up or didn’t. Trader reviews are the backbone of that mission, and they are only worth publishing if they are authentic. This page explains exactly how our review system works, how reviews are verified and weighted, what every number on the site means, what gets rejected, and the rules we hold ourselves to. We publish all of it openly so you can judge our scores the same way you judge a firm: on evidence.

Who can write a review

Anyone who has genuinely traded with, purchased from, or been funded by a listed firm can review it. You need a free account — sign in with Discord or with an email link; we never use passwords. One review per trader per firm, ever. If your experience changes, edit your existing review instead of writing a new one: you can update it for 30 days after publication, and edits go back through moderation like any new review.

✎ The fastest way in is the Futures Prop Firm Reviews hub: pick your firm at the top of the page and you’ll land on that firm’s review form. Every firm we list has its own reviews page, whether it has 93 reviews or none yet.

Write about your own experience, with enough of it to be meaningful. A review filed minutes after checkout tells readers nothing; a review after weeks of trading, a challenge attempt, or a payout request tells them everything. We ask for details like your account size, program type, and payout history because specifics are what make a review useful — and what make a fake one hard to write.

Verification tiers — and how scores are calculated

Every published review carries a verification badge, and we publish exactly how each tier counts toward a firm’s score. Most review sites keep this math private. We think that’s backwards.

Unverified. The reviewer confirmed their email and nothing more. These reviews are displayed for completeness but carry zero weight in the firm’s score.

Community. The reviewer verified membership of the DamnGoodTrading Discord at the time of submission. Community reviews count at full weight — our community is our first line of authenticity, and badges are locked in when the review is written.

Verified Purchase. The reviewer supplied a receipt or purchase details that we cross-checked against firm records. Full weight.

Verified Payout. The reviewer uploaded a payout certificate or proof of payment that we manually verified. Full weight, and these reviews sort first — nothing establishes credibility like documented money received.

✎ The threshold. A firm’s star rating is the average of its verified reviews (Community, Verified Purchase and Verified Payout). Unverified reviews never move the number. A star rating is shown only once a firm has three or more verified reviews — a score built on one or two reviews is noise, and we treat it that way. Below three, the firm’s page shows its review count and the individual reviews, but no average.

✎ Category scores. Verified reviewers also rate four categories: Payouts, Rules, Support and Platform. A firm’s category score is the average from the reviewers who rated that category, and it is shown only once three or more reviewers have rated it. The Payouts category is rated only by traders who have received a payout — a reviewer who hasn’t reached one selects “Never received a payout” instead, and that answer is excluded from the average rather than counted as a low score. This is why a firm can show a star rating and no Payouts score: not enough of its reviewers have been paid yet to make one meaningful.

✎ Payout counts — what “traders report receiving payouts” means

On the reviews hub and on firm pages you’ll see lines like “12 traders report receiving payouts · 4 verified with proof.” Here is exactly what those two numbers are, and what they are not.

Traders reporting payouts is the number of verified reviewers of that firm who told us they have received at least one payout — either by ticking “I reached a payout” on the review form or by uploading a payout certificate. It is self-reported, and it counts people, not dollars.

Verified with proof is the number of those reviewers who uploaded a payout certificate or proof of payment that a member of our moderation team opened and checked. This is the harder number, and it is the one we’d point you to first.

What we deliberately don’t publish. We never show payout figures as a share of reviewers — no “12 of 30.” A trader who didn’t pass the evaluation was never in a position to receive a payout, so a percentage would read as “this firm doesn’t pay” when it mostly means “most of these reviewers didn’t get funded.” We also don’t publish the total number of payouts reviewers say they’ve received; it’s a typed number we can’t verify, so it stays inside moderation. A firm with a small count simply has fewer paid reviewers so far. It is not evidence of non-payment, and we will not let the layout imply otherwise.

Every review is human-moderated

Nothing publishes automatically. Every submission is read by a human before it appears, and moderation can take a few days. We reject reviews that are:

Not based on genuine first-hand experience · written or planted by a firm, its staff, or its competitors · incentivized in any form · spam, duplicates, or AI-generated filler · containing personal information about any individual · threats, harassment, or hate · off-topic for the firm being reviewed.

We also watch review velocity. When a firm suddenly receives a burst of reviews — whether a wave of anger after a blowup or a wave of praise from a damage-control campaign — those reviews get extra scrutiny before anything publishes. Review-bombing in either direction corrupts the data traders rely on, and we treat both directions the same.

No incentivized reviews. In either direction.

We never pay, reward, discount, or otherwise compensate anyone for writing a review, positive or negative. There is no points program, no giveaway entry, no perk attached to reviewing. A review you were rewarded for is advertising, and we don’t publish advertising as reviews.

The same rule applies to firms. If a prop firm offers traders anything of value in exchange for reviews on our platform — free accounts, resets, payouts, discounts, contest entries — we treat that as review manipulation. Firms caught soliciting reviews for value are flagged with a public caution notice on their pages. If a firm has offered you anything for a review, report it to us in the DamnGoodTrading Discord: you will be helping every trader who reads this site after you.

Honesty, accuracy, and your legal responsibility

Say what happened. Harsh is fine; false is not. Your overall rating and your opinions are yours — we will publish a one-star review of a firm we otherwise rate highly without hesitation. But specific factual claims, like “they denied my payout” or “support never replied for three weeks,” should be accurate and should be things you can back up. Proof uploads exist for exactly this reason, and we may ask you for supporting evidence before or after publishing a review that makes serious allegations. You are responsible for what you write; deliberately false statements of fact about a firm can carry legal consequences for their author, and we will remove reviews we conclude are fabricated.

If you never reached a payout with a firm, say so — the review form has a dedicated option for it. A review that is honest about what you did and didn’t experience is worth more to other traders than one that guesses.

Privacy and your data

Your email address is never published and never shared with firms. Proof uploads are private by default: they are visible only to our moderation team, are stripped of hidden metadata, and are used to verify your review.

✎ If you tick “Show this image publicly with my review” when submitting, we may display it on your review card after a human check. What gets displayed is a separate, resized copy — your original upload stays private. Before a copy goes public our team may crop or obscure account numbers, email addresses, names or any other personal detail visible on the document, and we keep a per-review switch to take it down at any time. PDFs are never displayed publicly regardless of consent. You can ask us to remove a public image whenever you like, and uploads submitted before this option existed stay private permanently.

Where our money comes from — and why it doesn’t touch reviews

Full transparency: DamnPropFirms earns affiliate commissions when traders purchase accounts through our links and codes. That is how the site is funded, and we disclose it everywhere rather than bury it. What we do not do — ever — is let it touch the review system. Firms cannot pay for placement, cannot pay to improve a score, cannot pay to remove or suppress a review, and are never shown reviewer identities. Negative reviews of firms we have affiliate relationships with are published under exactly the same rules as everything else.

✎ The reviews hub ranks firms by the number of verified reviews they have — not by rating, not by commission, and not by whether we have a partnership with them. A firm we don’t earn from sits in the same list, built by the same rules, as one we do.

If the reviews on this site ever stopped being trustworthy, the site would stop being worth anything — to you or to us. The firewall between our revenue and your reviews is not a courtesy; it is the business model.

Corrections and firm responses

Firms that believe a review contains a factual error may contact us with evidence, and we will investigate. We do not remove reviews because a firm dislikes them. A public firm-response feature, allowing one official reply per review, is planned — responses will be clearly labeled and held to these same guidelines.