Listing Policies

We have a few simple rules about listing contact addresses and numbers. While our aim is to make it easier to get in touch with large organisations, we don't condone the use of the information on this site to "queue jump" or harrass individual staff members. To that end, we follow these guidelines:

Any information listed here must have been voluntarily given to you (or someone else) for use in contacting the organisation. For example, if, while on the phone to a customer service department, you ask them if they have a direct telephone number and they say "yes", then you can list the number here. If you've found a number via your own local telephone directory or yellow pages, then you can list it here for the benefit of people who may not have easy access to the same source. But if you found an unpublicised internal number through a leaked departmental phone list, then you shouldn't list it.
We don't list direct phone lines to identifiable individuals, or individual named email addresses (eg, fred.bloggs@bigcompany.com). There are three reasons why not: For a start, it's not usually helpful as you can't guarantee that an individual will always be around to answer your query; secondly such contact details go out of date very quickly as people change jobs; and finally we just don't think it's fair on the individuals involved - it isn't their fault that they work for a company that's hard to contact!
We don't have any particular stance on the geographic/non-geographic number debate. That is, we don't have any preference for listing ordinary, landline-based numbers over "national rate" and similar types of number. If you want to find the geographic equivalent of a national rate number in the UK, then SAYNOTO0870.COM has a good list for the UK (if anyone knows of an equivalent site for the US and other countries, then please let us know and we'll add a link). But the premise of this site is that any number which works is better than no number at all, so we'll happily list premium rate numbers if necessary. You can add multiple contact details for a single company, so if you know an alternative number then you can add it to an existing listing.

Removal Policies

Removing contact details from this site is a somewhat contentious issue. We have a few basic rules here:

We will remove any details that are reported by our users to be incorrect or non-functioning. If we get several comments on a listing which say that it doesn't work, we'll take it off. Simple.
We won't remove a listing just because the organisation in question doesn't want it publicised. Provided a listing meets the requirements for being published in the first place (see above), then we consider it public knowledge and suitable for listing here. The only exception to this is that we will, on request, replace incorrect or outdated contact details with the correct ones, provided that this does not reduce the contactability of the organisation in question. For example, if Big Corporation gets in touch to say "phone number xxx is outdated, please let your readers know that they can now use yyy to reach the same department", then that's fair enough. But if we get a message saying "remove email address zzz@zzz from your listing and tell people to use our website instead" then we'll ignore it - it's precisely in order to counter this kind of corporate arrogance that this site exists.