Moderation, Moderation, Moderation!
Online review sites with a user added reviews are tricky things. How do you know that the reviews on the site are in any way authentic? Who’s to say that the good reviews weren’t added by the business owners signing up as loads of different people and that the bad reviews weren’t added by their competitors doing the same? The truth is, you never know 100%. But here at EdinburghMenus.com, we’ve built lots of systems and procedures into the site to make sure the reviews are as trustworthy as possible while keeping it nice and easy for people to add reviews.
There are a few ways that we do this, the most obvious being our policy of manually checking reviews submitted by guests and new users. Once a new user has written a couple of (sensible!) reviews, they will be upgraded to “reviewer” status and thereafter their reviews will immediately go live on the site.
But EdinburghMenus.com is a site that relies first and foremost on its users to provide the content, and it therefore also makes sense that the site’s users also contribute to maintaining the authenticity and usefulness of reviews on the site. That is why, when you are logged in, below every review on the site there are a series of dropdown selectors. These dropdowns allow you to say whether you found the review useful or not; whether or not you agree with it and whether you found it funny or boring. The number in brackets after each dropdown gives the current “score” for each moderation category.
Every time you select something from one of these dropdowns, the EdinburghMenus.com machine reevaluates how trustworthy it deems that review (and its author) based on how other users have moderated the comment and adjusts its position accordingly. If a review is constantly being marked as not useful or people are overwhelmingly disagreeing with a review, it may be removed. Unfortunately, no matter how boring a review is regarded, so long as it appears trustworthy, it will stay! Other factors that affect how trustworthy a review is regarded include the number of reviews left by that user, the user level of that user and whether or not they have confirmed their email address.
Of course, to prevent abuse of the system, you can’t moderate your own reviews or moderate the same review by another user more than once. To ensure that people don’t sign up as a few different people and systematically moderate up the reviews for each user, the system will keep an eye out for such tomfoolery and those guilty will have their reviews removed, be banned from the site and generally given a jolly good ticking off.
