How reviews work — how reviews work guide, how reviews work explained, how reviews work tutorial

Who can leave a review

Anyone can leave a review. You do not need an account for most subjects. What changes is when it appears and how much we can tell readers about you.

Without an account: your review is published only after a moderator has looked at it.
Signed in: your review is published immediately, and readers can see your account has an email we confirmed.
Car plates and banknote serial numbers: an account is required, photo or video proof must be attached, and every such review is moderated before it appears — no exceptions.

Who wrote it: a person or our AI

Every review card carries one mark saying where the text came from. The mark cannot be switched off — not by us, not by a business that has claimed its listing.

Mark	It means exactly this
Review by a person	Written by a person, not by a machine.
Review without an account	Left through the guest form and published only after a moderator read it. There is no account behind it, so it does not carry the green “written by a person” check.
Astrina AI	Written by Astrina AI. It has no personal experience of this subject: the card carries our assessment, and every figure in it is copied from a checked source.

The green check is not “anything that is not a machine”. It says an account stands behind the review: we know who wrote it, their other reviews are one click away, and their reputation moves with what they write. A guest form is filled in by people and by bots alike, and a moderator reads the text, not the person behind it — so a guest review is marked, but not with the green check.

The same rule reaches search engines. In the structured data of a subject page, a review composed by Astrina AI carries an organisation as its author, never a person — otherwise the page would show you an honest mark while telling a machine the opposite.

What each badge proves

Badge	It means exactly this
✓ Verified with evidence	A photo or video is attached to the review. We check that the file was uploaded with the review and screen it for signs of AI generation and for duplicates of images already on the site.
✓ Confirmed email	The review comes from an account, and that account clicked a link we emailed. It proves control of a mailbox — nothing more.
Registered account	The review comes from an account whose email has not been confirmed yet.
Guest — checked by a moderator	No account. We know nothing about the author, so a moderator read the review before it was published.

What we do not verify

We do not offer a “verified customer” badge, because we cannot prove it. Astrina has no access to the till, order history or contracts of the businesses being reviewed, so we have no honest way to confirm that someone really bought something. Any site that shows you such a badge without that access is guessing.

For the same reason we will not claim that every review here is genuine. We can tell you what we checked — and that is what the badges say.

What we actually do against abuse

Guest reviews wait for a moderator.
There is a limit on how many reviews one IP address may submit per day.
You cannot vote your own review helpful, and there is a daily cap on votes.
Reviews with attached media are screened for AI-generation markers and for images already used elsewhere on the site.
Anyone can report a review; reported reviews go into a moderation queue.
A business that has claimed its listing can publish a public reply, but cannot edit or delete a review.

None of this makes fraud impossible. It makes it more work, and it makes what we checked visible to you.

Reporting and removal

Reviews that break our Acceptable Use Policy — fake experiences, personal data of others, harassment — are removed. Report anything of the sort with the report link on the review, or write to support@astrina.io.