Moderation | Rate Your Landlord

Moderation Procedure

What is moderation?

Moderation is the process of reducing the force or severity of something. We are moderating review comments, if necessary, to ensure that both students and landlords are reasonably fair in their opinions. This includes removing profanities, or other terms and phrases that could cause an issue. It must be stressed that all reviews are matters of opinions, and all comments should be assumed to begin with 'I think...' or 'In my opinion...'. The list of rules is below.

Submission and Moderation Rules

Rate Your Landlord is a joint venture between Unipol Student Homes, Leeds University Union, University of York and York St John.

In submitting a review to the site:

reviews must come from students and no one else
if there is reason to believe that the review has been provided by an owner/agents the review will not be published
review comments and any right of reply are restricted to 140 characters.
only reviews for the current academic year and the two preceeding years will be accepted.

Student reviewers:

can only review the person or company they pay rent to, and no-one else
can only supply one review per landlord per academic year (with the year running from September 1st to August 31st)
can only reflect their own opinions and not the opinions of others
cannot include names or personal data
cannot use any profanities (swear words or vulgar language).

Students are urged to make reviews as specific as possible to be of most use to other students.

All messages can be traced and in the event of the facility being abused action will be taken.

Rate Your Landlord operates an active policy against discrimination and takes action against anyone who attempts to discriminate on the basis of disability, gender, sexuality, race, age, religion or belief or sexual orientation. Reviews or replies that are in contradiction to this policy will not be approved and action may be taken.

Moderation of Content

All reviews submitted by students to Rate Your Landlord are moderated by a small team of trained staff and reviews will either be amended to comply with the moderation procedure, approved or rejected.

a) Discussion of any illegal activities will be removed and may be passed to the relevant authorities.

b) Allegations of criminality or illegality may be passed to a regulator or authority.

c) If the review is rejected the student will be emailed to say that the review did not meet the moderation procedure and the review will not be forwarded to the landlord.

d) Landlords have a right of reply to an accepted review (the term landlords also refers to the landlord’s representative if a managing or letting agent). The student will be told once the review has been received that it will be sent to the landlord and the landlord will be sent the moderated review for any reply. Every effort will be made to get a contact email for the landlord (internet search, contact with reviewer).

e) After five working days whether or not the landlord has exercised their right of reply, the review will go live. Landlords can still post a reply after the five days and late postings will be applied by Unipol at the earliest available opportunity. Late replies must be sent by email to Moderators@rateyourlandlord.org.uk stating clearly which review the reply relates to.

f) All reviews and replies are confidential to the parties until they go live. Once live they will remain on the website for 3 years when they will be removed.

g) If the review and the response are contradictory both parties will be asked if they stand by their comments and if so the review and reply will go live as they stand. Only conflicts involving significant matters of fact will result in the review being removed and this is entirely at the discretion of Unipol, Leeds University Union, University of York and York St John University.

h) If there are a large number of amendments or disagreement between reviewer and landlord, Unipol, Leeds University Union, University of York and York St John University reserve the right to edit either response to make it suitable for publishing and can, at its sole discretion, decide to remove the review or part of the review.

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