Moderation

The following Manage Content solutions allow you to see the outcome of the Bazaarvoice moderation process for your UGC:

• Ratings & Reviews in Portal
• Questions & Answers (beta) in Portal

Use these solutions to see whether Bazaarvoice approved or rejected your content and the reasons why moderators rejected content.

Moderation process

All user-generated content (UGC) submitted through your site goes through a rigorous moderation process.

• Content is initially reviewed by a sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool. If the NLP tool is highly confident that the content aligns with brand criteria, the content is automatically approved and published.
• If the content needs an additional review, the NLP tool will pass it on to Bazaarvoice human moderators, who will read and tag content for approval, rejection, or review.

The following flow chart shows the content moderation process:

• You can configure Ratings & Reviews Collect-Distribute to alert a consumer when they enter profanity in a submission form. Refer to Enable profanity moderation for details.

• If a review is rejected by a moderator, the contributor receives an email notification but the message lacks an explanation by default. You can configure review resubmission to include moderators’ reasons in the email message to the consumer.

• Moderation guidelines for seller ratings require seller reviews to review the seller or shopping experience, not the product. Google requires following these guidelines when sharing content with it. In addition, note these important points:

  • The guidelines have been approved for use by Google and cannot be altered.
  • Your employees cannot leave a seller rating for your company.
  • The guidelines cannot be customized.
  • Any review that includes a price reference will be rejected. Seller ratings must be about the company as a whole, not specific products or prices.

Rejection codes

To reject a review, a moderator tags the content with one or more of the following rejection codes. Rejection codes are categorized as editable or non-editable:

• Editable—Moderators use editable codes when a review contains useful content but also includes some forbidden information, such as a competitor’s name or inappropriate media. When a review is tagged with one of these codes, the contributor receives an email with an editable copy of the original review and a submission link. The email lists the reasons for rejection and highlights them in the review text. The contributor can edit the review and resubmit it for moderation.

  Here are the editable codes:

  Note: Not all codes are available for all clients/situations.

  Code	Description	Code	Description
  CR	Competitor references	PRI	Price mentioned
  IMG	Inappropriate image	SI	Shipping and fulfillment
  MSR	Misleading star rating	URL	Contains a URL
  PII	Personally identifying information	VAC	Vacuous/irrelevant

• Non-editable—Moderators use non-editable codes when a review lacks useful content, such as a duplicate or spam review. When a review is tagged with one of these codes, the contributor receives an email with an empty review form and a submission link. The contributor can then choose to submit a new review.

  Here are the non-editable codes:

  Code	Description	Code	Description
  FL	Language used does not match site	SPM	Duplicate or spam submissions
  GIU	Inappropriate content	VAC	Vacuous/irrelevant
  LI	Legally sensitive content	WP	Applies to different product
  PUX	Lacks personal experience

If you want to tell a review contributor why their content was rejected, use the review resubmission feature to add moderators’ reasons for rejection to the email.

Syndication stop codes

In addition to the general syndication guidelines, Bazaarvoice Content Network has defined additional guidelines for syndication. For example, some content may be syndicated for the sender, but not for the recipient. References to price, customer service, shipping/delivery, or the location of purchase that appear in multiple locations may create confusion or introduce friction, and therefore are not allowed to be syndicated.

Code	Description
CSN	Indicates customer service experiences / interactions; not the focus of the review
NSI	Indicates shipping and fulfillment experiences
PRI	The price or cost of a product or service is included in the user's feedback
RET	Reference to named retailer where a product or service was purchased

Authenticity codes

The Bazaarvoice Authenticity team uses sophisticated tools and systems to detect suspicious content. These authenticity processes allow the team to reject content identified as fraudulent or non-compliant with the Bazaarvoice Authenticity Policy.

You cannot edit authenticity codes. Only the Authenticity team can reverse authenticity decisions.

Note: If you have questions about rejected content, contact Bazaarvoice Support to submit a support case. Questioning a decision does not guarantee the Authenticity team will approve the content.

Content rejected by the Authenticity team will be marked with the following codes:

Parent code	Code	POL codes	Description
AUTH			The Authenticity team has rejected content Note: The AUTH code will appear on all content that is rejected for any reason by the Authenticity team.
	NBD (legacy)		Review needs a badge to disclose relevant information to consumers
	FRD		Content is rejected due to fraud concerns
	POL		Content is rejected for violating Bazaarvoice policy Note: Content with this code will also have one of the following specific policy violation codes.
		DATA	Review is missing required authenticity data in accordance with Bazaarvoice contractual obligations
		DUP	Multiple reviews for a single product by a unique user
		INCENT	Incentivized review is missing the required incentivised disclosure badge
		STAFF	Staff review is missing the required staff disclosure badge
		SPAM	Review content is spam or was submitted from a restricted or sanctioned country

Client codes

We use client codes to indicate client events that impact the content (for example, a review that the client has re-moderated).

Code	Description
ABC	Indicates approval made by the client
RBC	Indicates rejection made by the client
REMOD	Denotes previously approved content that is reported by a user and returned through BV moderation

Determine why content was rejected

Bazaarvoice moderators typically reject content that is either inappropriate or goes against review submission guidelines. From time to time, you may occasionally review Bazaarvoice-moderated content and find content we’ve rejected that you want to remoderate.

To understand why the content was rejected:

1. Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Portal .
2. From the navigation bar, select Ratings & Reviews > Reviews.
3. To find rejected content, select the Moderation filter.
4. From the drop-down list, select Moderation Status, and then select Rejected.
5. Select Apply and close. The page refreshes to display a list of rejected reviews.
6. Scroll through the list of rejected reviews.
7. If a review appears that has been rejected incorrectly, select either the review title or View details to open it.
8. Read the review text and view any included visual content.

   

   Note: In the panel to the right of the review content, you can view moderation codes detailing why this review was rejected.
9. Select Approve to approve the review for publication.
   Note: The Approved by Client (ABC) moderation code is applied and locked automatically to show that you approved the review. Once applied, this code will be permanently displayed with the review in Ratings & Reviews.
10. (Optional) Add an internal note to share why you thought this review required remoderation.

Note: To approve or reject reviews, you must be assigned the role of Account Administrator, Content Administrator, or Content Moderator. Learn more about Portal roles and permissions.

Enable profanity moderation

You can alert a consumer when they enter profanity in a Ratings & Reviews Collect-Distribute submission form on your product page. The consumer cannot submit the content until the profanity is removed.

Contact Bazaarvoice Support to enable profanity moderation.

Before beginning, consider these best practices:

• Be thoughtful before removing a word from the profanity list. After you remove a word, it is no longer disallowed and the word might show up on your site.
• When adding a word to a list, consider benign uses of the word and how consumers might use the word.
• If you have optimistic publishing enabled, which is a configuration option for Questions & Answers, keep in mind that the list might affect what shows up on your site before moderation.

Note: After you enable profanity moderation, existing content is not remoderated. If content exists that includes a word that is now prohibited, the word remains in the review or question.

Enable optimistic publishing

Optimistic publishing provides a way to simultaneously display UGC on your site as soon as it is submitted and submit the content to Bazaarvoice moderation for insight and appropriateness tagging. This means consumers’ UGC is published right away, and product display pages (PDP) are populated immediately with dynamic content for improved SEO. The content is also submitted for human moderation, which vets content for unrelated remarks, inflammatory or vitriolic statements, and non-compliant content.

Though a certain level of risk exists when publishing UGC prior to human moderation, all UGC is scanned for profanity and inappropriate slang before content is accepted and published. Content that ultimately fails Bazaarvoice moderation is removed from your site.

Contact Bazaarvoice Support to enable optimistic publishing.

Configure alerts for rejected content

Some content may contain sensitive information that needs to be communicated to someone in your organization. For example, content that has been rejected for mentioning a safety issue may need to be sent to your legal department.

Follow these steps to set up rules that will automatically send certain content to specified people or groups:

1. Sign in to the Workbench and hover over Alerts.
2. Select Create A New Alert.
3. Select Event Triggered and select Continue.
4. Fill in the text fields with your desired settings and select Save & Continue.  Repeat this step for each screen until you have completed the setup.

Enable remoderation

Remoderation enables visitors to your site to flag inappropriate reviews or comments, which sends the content back to Bazaarvoice for human moderation. Remoderation occurs when Report is selected a minimum of three times.

Follow these steps to enable remoderation:

1. Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Portal .
2. From the upper-right corner, select the settings icon .
3. Select Configuration.
4. Select the instance.
5. Select Go to Configuration. The Site Manager appears, listing the available deployment zones and implementations.
6. From the Implementations section, select Edit next to the implementation you want to configure.
7. Select Display Options on the sidebar, and select the Ratings & Reviews tab.
8. Under Review Helpfulness Voting, select Enabled.

COPPA support

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is intended to control what information is collected from children under the age of 13. It applies to operators of commercial websites and online services that collect, use, or disclose information from site visitors.

For detailed information about COPPA, refer to the following:

• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998
• Frequently Asked Questions about complying with COPPA

Bazaarvoice gives you the option to block users under any age from contributing content to your sites. Although COPPA protections apply only to children under 13, you can choose to block all users under 18, for example.

Using the following methods, you can design Bazaarvoice content submission forms and profile pages to discourage users from falsifying their age, and to detect and block underage users:

• Implement a neutral age-screening mechanism on the content submission form or profile page where:
  • Users can select an age range, such as 17 or under.
  • No indication or message is displayed that alerts a visitor that they must be 18 years or older to contribute.
• Add a COPPA cookie for users under 18 years old, which recognizes the user agent or IP address and prevents the user from:
  • Using the Back button to enter a different age.
  • Using the same device and browser to log in at a later time and submit content.

  The cookie persists for 365 days.

Note: The age-screening mechanism is always enabled and is not affected by user authentication or by how a visitor accesses your site. For example, age-screening works the same whether the visitor selects the Write a review link on a retailer site or an email link that opens the review submission form. Bazaarvoice cannot provide you with guidance on COPPA, and in no event should this document be construed as such.