How we check reviews

What we verify before a review appears, what we deliberately do not, and what a review can never influence.

Reviews on Aptora are written by two parties about working with each other. Anyone reading one is entitled to know how it came about, so this page says it plainly — including the parts that are uncomfortable for us.

Only a collaboration both sides confirmed can be rated

A review always belongs to one specific collaboration. One side enters it, the other side has to confirm it, and only then does a rating window open — for both of them, for 14 days. Nobody can review a company they never worked with, and nobody can be reviewed by someone who says the work never happened.

Each side writes at most one review of the other per collaboration. There is no path to a review that does not start here.

Both sides rate blind

While you write your review you cannot see the other side's. Both become visible in the same moment: when both have been submitted, or when the 14-day window closes — whichever comes first. A submitted review can no longer be edited or withdrawn.

That is deliberate. Nobody can wait to see what the other side wrote, and nobody can answer a poor review with a retaliatory one.

Two levels of provenance, and we name the one that applies

Every collaboration records how we came to know about it. There are two levels:

Created through Aptora

We hold our own record of contact between exactly these two parties — an outreach, an application, or a shortlist entry. The collaboration is not only asserted by the parties; something on our side matches it.

Self-reported, confirmed by both sides

We hold no such record. Both parties stated the collaboration took place and both confirmed it, and that is the entire basis. We did not check it against anything else.

Today every collaboration on Aptora is self-reported. The platform-mediated contact paths exist but have not yet produced a confirmed collaboration, so labelling anything "created through Aptora" would flatter us rather than inform you.

What we do not check

We would rather list this than let you assume otherwise:

  • No contracts, no invoices, no timesheets, no order confirmations. We never see them.
  • No proof that the work described was actually performed, how long it ran, or what it was worth.
  • No calls to references, employers or clients.
  • No identity check beyond the account itself.

This is why the words "verified review" appear nowhere on Aptora. The sentence we can stand behind is narrower and true: both sides confirmed that they worked together.

Reporting a review, and what happens next

A review can be reported for five reasons: an untrue factual claim, an insult, a collaboration that never took place, personal data about someone else, or spam. The rated party may report any of them; every signed-in user may report an insult, third-party personal data or spam.

  1. You are notified that the report arrived.
  2. A report starts an examination — it removes nothing. The review stays visible and is marked as under examination. Anything else would turn reporting into a delete button for inconvenient reviews.
  3. For "this collaboration never took place" we check the record both parties confirmed and answer on that basis. We never disclose who wrote a review.
  4. You are told the outcome and the reason for it.

The rated party may publish exactly one reply to a review. It sits underneath, it cannot be edited afterwards, and there is no thread: a second round would be an argument rather than information for the reader.

Before publication an automatic check reads the free text for insults, personal data about third parties, and factual claims nobody can verify. Only what it flags waits for a person to look at it; everything else is published without prior moderation. If the check cannot run, the text waits instead of passing unchecked.

A review is removed only through a decision that is recorded together with its reason. There is no second route — not for us, and not for anyone asking us.

When an account is deleted

Reviews about the deleted person or company go with the account. Reviews that person wrote about others stay, permanently pseudonymised — otherwise deleting an account would be a reputation reset for everyone they rated. The underlying collaboration is anonymised rather than deleted, because the remaining reviews rest on it.

We neither pay for reviews nor delete them on request

Nobody is paid, discounted, rewarded or otherwise nudged into writing a review, and we write none ourselves. No plan on Aptora buys a better rating, a filtered set of ratings, or the removal of one.

When someone asks us to take down a review about them, the answer is the reporting process above — the same one open to everybody else, with the same recorded decision at the end of it.

Reviews do not influence ranking

Where a profile or a job appears in a search result or a match is decided by skills, job titles and the requirements stated in the listing. Reputation data is not one of those inputs, and no plan changes that.

A sentence like this holds only as long as somebody remembers it, so we do not rely on memory: our test suite fails the build the moment a search or matching query reads the reputation tables.

Questions about this page

Use the contact address in our imprint.