Review scoring

How individual reviews become a provider's rating, and what is deliberately excluded.

A provider's rating is the mean of its published reviews. The interesting part is what counts as one.

What counts as a review

A parent review: one person's account of using a provider, with scores across the four dimensions.

What does not count:

• Replies. A provider responding, or anybody replying in a thread, is a reply. It has no scores and is not a review. This applies everywhere, consistently: the rating, the review count on the listing, the "reviews this month" figures, provider statistics and analytics.
• Unpublished reviews. Anything in moderation or removed is not in the average.
• Votes. Marking a review helpful ranks the review; it does not affect the provider's score.

The four dimensions

Performance, support, value for money and reliability are scored separately, and the distribution of each is shown rather than only its mean. A provider with a wide spread on support is telling you something a single average would hide.

No reviews is not zero

A provider nobody has reviewed shows "not yet rated". It does not show 0.0, and it is not ranked as though it had scored badly. A zero is a rating, and nobody gave it one.

Recency

Review dates are always shown, and sorting by recency is available, because how much weight to give an old review depends on what it is about. A support experience from two years ago is much weaker evidence than a two-year-old note about hardware.

Moderation

Reviews are moderated by people, and can be reported by anybody, including the provider. What moderation removes is abuse, fabrication and conflicts of interest, and what it does not remove is a negative review that is accurate. A provider disagreeing with a review is what the public reply is for.

What cannot happen

There is no arrangement under which a provider's rating can be changed by a commercial relationship, and no mechanism through which one could be. Ratings are computed from published reviews and nothing else.