All user-generated content (UGC) submitted through your site goes through a moderation process. Content is first reviewed by a sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool. If the tool is highly confident that the content meets brand criteria, it can be automatically approved and published. If the content needs additional review, however, the NLP tool will pass it on to human moderators who read and tag content for approval or rejection.

Submitted content can be found on the Bazaarvoice Workbench under Content.

The following flow chart shows the content moderation process:

When you use Bazaarvoice, all of the content submitted through your site goes through a moderation process. Content is first reviewed by a sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool. If the tool is highly confident that the content meets brand criteria, it can be automatically approved and published. If the content needs additional review, however, the NLP tool will pass it on to human moderators who read and tag content for approval, rejection, or review. Content then goes through further filtering based on your customized rules and alerts.

To evaluate content or review the results of moderation for your content, you can view trends in categories, products, and rejected reviews on your site. This can provide valuable insight to your marketing, customer service, product development, and merchandising teams. You can find this information under the Reports section of the Workbench.

Regarding Moderation and Ratings & Reviews, be aware of the following:

  • You can configure Ratings & Reviews legacy (PRR) 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.

  • 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 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 review or spam. 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 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

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 moderation team, a unique branch of content management, uses sophisticated tools and systems to detect suspicious content. These authenticity processes enable Bazaarvoice to reject content if the content is identified to be fraudulent or not in compliance with the Bazaarvoice Authenticity Policy.

Code Description
FRD Indicates suspicious review activity
DUP Indicates suspicious review activity, such as multiple reviews on a single product by a unique user
NBD Applied when a review is flagged as in need of a badge for disclosure to end users

Client codes

We use client codes as indicators of events that has impacted the content (for example, the labels that signify an event that occurred). Client codes do not change or impact the status of content.

Code Description
ABC Indication of approval made through Workbench by the client
RBC Indication of rejection made through Workbench 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 reject inappropriate content before it is published to your website. You might occasionally notice a piece of rejected content that looks like it should have been approved.

Complete the following steps to determine why content was rejected:

  1. Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Workbench.
  2. Hover over Content at the top of the screen. If you have more than one Bazaarvoice product or Ratings & Reviews legacy (PRR) feature, your next step depends on the content type you want to inspect. To determine rejected content in Ratings & Reviews, for example, select Ratings & Reviews under the Content Dashboards section.
  3. Hover over the Moderation filter. From the dropdown menu, select Moderation Status, and then select the Rejected option.
  4. Select Apply. The page refreshes to display rejected review data.
  5. Select Show Reviews.

At this point, a specific review (or set of reviews) should appear or, if you haven’t applied any additional filters from the Dashboards screen, all rejected reviews within the date range originally defined.

  1. Scroll down to look at a sampling of reviews. If a review appears that has been rejected incorrectly, hover over the review and select Show Details.
    Show details
  2. After the detailed view for that review appears, check the the code the moderator applied in the Moderator Codes section. When filtering by a specific moderator code, the offending content will be highlighted in yellow within the review management tool.
    Moderator codes

If you want to view all rejected content under a specific code, hover over the Moderation menu and select Moderator Codes. Check the appropriate content code box, and then select Apply.

When the screen refreshes, all reviews that our moderators rejected with that specific code will appear.

Enable profanity moderation

You can alert a consumer when they enter profanity in a Ratings & Reviews legacy (PRR) 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 Portal menu, select Configuration.
  3. Select the instance.
  4. Select Go to Configuration. The Site Manager appears, listing the available deployment zones and implementations.
  5. From the Implementations section, select Edit next to the implementation you want to configure.
  6. Select Display Options on the sidebar, and select the Ratings & Reviews tab.
  7. 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:

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.