Moderation Policy

Why we moderate

Two reasons. First, reviews are only useful if they are real, first-hand, and specific, so we filter spam and fakes aggressively. Second, housing content carries legal weight: fair housing law prohibits steering buyers based on protected characteristics, and we hold contributed content to that standard with no exceptions.

The pipeline

Every submission goes through three layers:

• Automated screening. Each submission is checked for spam patterns, duplicate content, personal information, prohibited language, and fair housing risk. Clear violations are declined immediately with the reason shown. Borderline content is routed to a priority human queue.
• Human review. A person reads every submission before it is published. Nothing goes live on automated approval alone. Our target is review within one to two business days.
• Community reports. Published content can be flagged by any reader. Flagged content is re-reviewed, and content that gathers multiple open flags is hidden while we investigate.

Fair housing review

Submissions that the automated screen marks for possible fair housing issues enter a dedicated review queue where the flagged language is examined in context by a trained reviewer. We decline content that characterizes communities by who lives there, signals desirability through demographics, or comments on protected classes in any evaluative way, including coded language. This standard applies equally to reviews, discussion posts, and the AI-generated summaries built from them.

Decisions you may receive

• Approved: your contribution is published.
• Revision requested: part of your submission needs a change. We tell you which part and why; revise and resubmit.
• Declined: the submission cannot be published. The reason is shown in your account.
• Removed: previously published content was taken down after a re-review or report.

Appeals

You can appeal any decline or removal from your account within 30 days. Appeals are read by a different reviewer than the one who made the original decision. We aim to answer appeals within five business days, and the outcome is final.

Account-level enforcement

Our normal ladder is: decline with reason, then temporary suspension, then permanent ban. Two categories skip the ladder: discriminatory content and review fraud (paid reviews, fake accounts, vote manipulation) can result in immediate permanent bans. Account bans are decided by two reviewers, not one.

Score integrity

Community scores are computed from approved contributions under the published methodology. We monitor for review bombing, coordinated submissions, and other manipulation. When we detect an attack on a community's score, the score is frozen at its last clean value while we investigate, and fraudulent contributions are removed from the record.

Audit trail

Every moderation action, automated or human, is logged with its reason in an internal record that cannot be edited after the fact. We run a quarterly internal audit of moderation decisions against our fair housing standard and publish contribution and moderation counts in our quarterly reports.

What we do not do

• We do not edit the substance of anyone's review. We either publish what you wrote or we tell you why we cannot.
• We do not remove reviews because they are negative. Critical, factual reviews of communities (and of experiences with builders or HOAs) are exactly the point.
• We do not accept payment to publish, feature, or remove a review, from anyone.

Report a problem

Use the report link on any review or post, or contact us directly:

This policy works together with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.