Transparent moderation: what the public log shows

Every review platform moderates. The real question is whether you can see it happen. When a critical review quietly disappears, or a wave of five-star reviews shows up overnight, readers usually have no way to tell what went on behind the scenes.

On SaaS.Vote, every product page has a Moderation log link next to the reviews heading. It lists every moderation action on that product’s reviews: when they were submitted, published, reported, hidden, edited or deleted, and which side acted. This post follows a review through its life and explains what each step leaves in the log, and what deliberately stays private.

The life of a review

1. An existing product

Reviews can target only products already published in the catalog. Submitting a review never creates a new product from an arbitrary website URL. If the product is missing, add it separately first.

Authors sign in with LinkedIn or confirm a customer address on the product’s branded review form. Each person can review a product once.

2. Immediate publication

Reviews publish immediately after submission. There is no approval queue or two-hour wait. Customer verification runs separately and may add a label later. The product team cannot delay publication.

3. Labels added later

Customer confirmation appears on the review and in the public log. Email addresses and responses from the verification API are never public.

Under-attack mode

An unusual burst of reviews can pause automatic customer-verification checks. New reviews and edits continue to publish immediately. Moderators review reports requesting removal, and the product team cannot hide reviews itself.

Reports from product teams

Vendors do not get a delete button, but they do get a way to flag problems. The product team’s owner, managers and moderators can report a published review and must pick a reason:

• fake review or not a real customer experience;
• conflict of interest (competitor, employee, paid review);
• offensive, hateful or threatening content;
• personal or confidential information;
• spam or not about this product;
• another guideline violation, which needs a written explanation.

While the report is open, the review stays published. A review can have only one open report at a time, and reporting is rate limited, so a large team cannot flood the queue. SaaS.Vote moderators then decide:

• Report upheld: the review is hidden.
• Report dismissed: the review stays as it is.

Moderation decisions are final. In the public log, readers see “Review reported” with the reason category, followed by “Report upheld” or “Report dismissed”. The team that filed the report also sees the moderator’s note in its dashboard. The public never sees who filed the report, the details they wrote or the note.

Hidden reviews

SaaS.Vote moderators can hide a single review, or every review by one author when an account is clearly used for abuse. When moderators suspend an account, its visible reviews are hidden the same way and the person can no longer sign in. Hidden reviews can be restored. Each of these actions appears in the log (“Review hidden”, “Hidden along with all reviews by this author”, “Review restored”), but the text of a hidden review is not shown, and hidden reviews do not count toward the product’s rating.

Edits and edit history

Only the author can edit a review. Product teams can never change a review’s text or rating.

Edits to the text, rating and optional fields publish immediately. The log records “Review edited”. Editing a hidden review does not restore it: the report or account-ban visibility decision stays in effect.

Once an edit is live, the review shows when it was edited and keeps its earlier published versions one click away, each with its rating, text and publication date. If a customer raises their rating from two stars to four after the vendor fixed a problem, everyone can see that. A quiet rewrite of history is visible in the same way. Edits that never went public do not appear in that history.

Edits and account deletion

Authors can edit a review in their dashboard, but cannot delete an individual review after submitting it. Its history shows the original review and every updated version with the rating, text and date.

Deleting an account remains a separate privacy operation: it erases all of that account’s reviews, including their text, earlier versions and owner replies.

The log does not pretend the review never existed. Its earlier entries stay, no longer linked to the review, and a final “Deleted by the author” entry is added. So you can see that a review disappeared and that its author removed it, but not what it said. Product teams cannot delete reviews.

What the log shows, and what stays private

The public log is built from an explicit list of what may be shown.

Public:

• date and time of each action (in UTC);
• the review number, and for published, visible reviews the rating and the author’s name;
• the action itself;
• who acted, as a role: “Automatic”, “Product team”, “SaaS.Vote moderation” or “Review author”;
• for reports, the reason category and the outcome.

Private:

• the identities of the moderators and team members who acted;
• the text of hidden and deleted reviews;
• the details of reports and moderators’ notes;
• email addresses and customer-verification data, such as responses from a product’s API;
• edits that were never published, and internal verification retries.

The balance is intentional. Readers can see every decision and which side made it, while reviewers’ contact details stay protected and removed content is not republished through the back door.

How to use the log

Clicking a review number in the log shows the history of that one review. When you are evaluating a product, a quick scan is worth a minute:

• Reports and their outcomes show how the vendor reacts to criticism, and whether moderators agreed.
• Hiding and restoration entries show how review visibility changed.

Our guide on how to read B2B software reviews shows how to combine the log with ratings, filters and reviewer context. To understand the labels on each review, read How SaaS.Vote verifies B2B software reviews, or see the short overview on How it works. If you run a product team, Collecting honest reviews covers what your team can and cannot do. The rules behind moderation are part of our Terms of Service.