#Moderating reviews

For whoever works the review queue. Publishing, rejecting, replying, redacting and deleting, and what each one does to your storefront.

#The queue

Reviews lists everything that has arrived. A review is in one of four states:

Filter to what needs you rather than reading the whole list: "Needs review" is the queue, and you can narrow by rating, product, site or date. Save a filter you use daily as a quick filter. See Filtering.

#Publishing and rejecting

Open a review and use Publish or Reject. Publishing puts it on the storefront and adds it to the product's rating; rejecting records the decision and leaves it off. Either can be undone: a published review can be unpublished, and a rejected one published later.

Select several rows in the list to publish or reject them together, which is how to work through a backlog after an import or a busy weekend.

Nothing here deletes anything. A rejected review is still in Cascade, still searchable, and still yours.

#Automatic publishing

If most of what you get is fine, turn on Automatically publish new reviews under Settings → Reviews and set a rating threshold. Reviews at or above it go live on arrival and the rest wait for you.

Screening still holds anything it flags, whatever the rating. See Reviews.

#What the detail pane tells you

Beyond the text and the rating:

• The customer and the order, and whether they are a verified buyer.
• What they answered to your review questions, under the review body. A scale reads as its step out of the total, with the label for that step when it has one ("3 of 5 (True to size)"); a list of options reads as the options they picked. Questions and options you have since archived still show here, because the answer was given to them.
• Attachments, the photos and videos they uploaded.
• Why it was flagged, when screening caught something.
• How long the submission took after the page loaded. A review written in four seconds was probably not written by a person.
• Other reviews from the same IP address or browser, as a link. One browser reviewing as several different customers is the clearest signal of a fake review you have.

None of this decides anything for you. It is there so that the calls you have to make by hand are quick.

The pane opens at an even split with the list and remembers the width you prefer: drag its left edge to resize, and double-click the handle to return to the even split. The same pane works this way on every list page.

#Replying

Open a review and write a reply in the composer. It appears under the review body in the reviews widget, headed "Response from" whatever name you replied as.

A reply is published separately from the review it answers, so you can save a draft now and put it live later. A draft never reaches your storefront. Replies can be edited or deleted afterwards.

One reply per review. Editing the existing reply is the way to change what you said.

#Redacting

Redacting removes part of the text while keeping the review. Select the text you want gone and save the redaction. Use it when a customer includes a phone number, an order number, a staff member's name, or anything else that should not be on a public page.

The original text is kept privately the first time you redact, so the change is auditable and reversible by you. The storefront only ever sees the redacted version.

Redaction is the right tool for "this review is fine but that sentence cannot be public". For a review that should not exist at all, delete it.

#Deleting

Deleting is permanent, so Cascade asks why. Pick a reason:

• Abusive or inappropriate content
• Not about this product
• Spam
• Duplicate
• Test data
• The customer asked for it to be removed
• Other

You can add a note. The reason, the note and who deleted it are recorded with the archived review, which is what makes the decision defensible months later when someone asks why a review disappeared.

Prefer rejecting to deleting. Rejecting takes a review off the storefront and keeps the record; deleting is for content that should not exist anywhere, or that a customer has asked you to remove.

#Photos and videos

Reviews can carry image and video attachments, uploaded by the customer on the review page or brought in by an import. They show in the detail pane, and in the reviews widget on published reviews.

Attachments are moderated with the review rather than separately: publishing a review publishes its photos. Read the attachments before you publish, especially on a review whose text is unremarkable.

Imported media is copied into Cascade rather than linked, so it keeps working after you stop paying your old platform.

#Hearing about reviews as they arrive

Under Settings → Reviews, choose between a Slack message per review and a daily summary email, and which ratings you want to hear about. A common setup is Slack for 1 and 2 stars, and the daily summary for everything else.

#Spotting fake reviews

The signals worth reacting to, in rough order of usefulness:

1. One browser, several customers. The detail pane links the other reviews.

2. A submission written in seconds.

3. Links in the body. Turn on the link flag and let screening do it.

4. Not a verified buyer, on a store where nearly all reviews are.

5. A burst of similar reviews on one product in a short window.

6. Text that reads as AI-written, which screening flags on longer reviews with the score behind it. Read it before acting: a flag is not proof, and it is likelier on reviews written by people whose first language is not English.

The AI classifier catches the ones the rules cannot describe. See AI features.

#Data that ages out

The IP address and browser fingerprint recorded with a submission are cleared 90 days after the moderation decision, so older reviews show neither. Use the collision links while the review is recent; that is what they are for.