Handle a Reported Review

Goal: find reviews that members have reported, decide what to do, and set how many reports it takes to hide a review.

Check the report settings

1. Go to WB Plugins > Member Reviews and open the General tab.
2. Make sure Review Reporting is on. (“Allow users to report inappropriate reviews for admin moderation.”)
3. Set Auto-Hide Threshold. This is how many reports hide a review automatically. The default is 5. Enter 0 so that reports never hide a review.
4. Click Save Changes.

If you leave Auto-Hide Threshold blank, the plugin uses 5. It does not switch auto-hide off.

Find reported reviews

The plugin does not email you about reports. Check one of these:

• The Overview tab at WB Plugins > Member Reviews. A warning at the top says how many reviews are reported. Click Review now.
• The Reviews list. Click Reported above the list to show reviews with open reports. Click Auto-hidden to show only reviews that were hidden by reports.

In the list, the Reports column shows how many reports a review has. An auto-hidden review also shows an Auto-hidden badge. Hover over it to see when it was hidden.

Read the reports

1. Open the review (click its title).
2. Look at the Report Details box on the right. It shows the status, the total number of reports, and for each report the reason, who reported it and when.

Decide

If the reports are…	Do this
Wrong, and the review is fine	Click Dismiss Reports. A review that was hidden by reports is published again.
Right, and the review should go	Click Trash (or edit the text first if you only want to remove part of it). Then click Mark Resolved if you want to keep a record.
Right, but you want to keep the review hidden	Click Mark Resolved. The review stays hidden.
Right, but you want it back on the profile	Click Mark Resolved, then publish the review. The reports you resolved no longer count toward hiding it again.

After you click, the page shows “Review reports have been dismissed.” or “Review reports have been marked as resolved.”

Only Administrators and Editors can do this.

Do several at once

1. In the Reviews list, tick the reviews.
2. Pick Dismiss Reports or Resolve Reports under Bulk actions and click Apply.
3. The page shows how many reviews were updated.

Dismiss Reports in bulk works exactly like on a single review: a review hidden by reports is published again and its report count is reset. Resolve Reports marks the reports as resolved and leaves a hidden review hidden.

What happens with the next report

Both Dismiss Reports and Mark Resolved close the reports you have looked at. They no longer count toward the threshold. If the threshold is 5, the review needs 5 new reports to be hidden again.

The difference is only what happens to a hidden review: Dismiss publishes it again, Mark Resolved leaves it hidden until you publish it.

What members see

• A member who reported a review sees “Reported” in place of the Report button.
• A hidden review disappears from the profile, the member’s rating, and the activity stream.
• The member who reported is not told what you decided.

How you hear about reports

When a member reports a review, the site administrator gets a BuddyPress notification: “A member reported a review. Check it and dismiss or resolve the report.” Clicking it opens the review in the admin. It does not name the member who reported. It follows the BuddyPress Notifications switch, and there is one unread notification per review, however many reports arrive.

Tips

• Start with a threshold of 3 on a small site and raise it as you grow.
• A single report never hides a review unless the threshold is 1.
• Members cannot report their own reviews.

If it does not work

See “A reported review has vanished” in Troubleshooting.