Students can now leave accommodation reviews with a rating and comment.
To enable this feature, you will need to go to Admin > Settings > Listings and tick the "Enable reviews" box.
How it works
Listings will show an average rating at the top of each listing and a link to the reviews section.
Students who have registered and signed in will be able to leave reviews with a rating out of five and comment. There's a character counter on the review form to help with the length requirements (between 50 and 5000 characters).
Newly submitted reviews will need to be approved by an administrator before they become publicly visible and contribute to a property's overall rating. The student will however be able to see their review while it is awaiting approval.
The administration process for new reviews
As an administrator, you can check for new reviews on the Overview tab in admin.
Note: You can also choose to be notified by email when new reviews are submitted by editing your administrator account (under Admin > Settings > Administrators) and ticking the box to "Notify when new listings, reviews or registrations need approval".
Click on a review, and you will be able to read the full review and "Approve" or "Reject" it.
If you need to edit the review for publication, there's a button on the right for that.
Once a review has been approved it will become visible to everyone, and the review's rating will contribute to the average rating for the accommodation.
If you do decide to reject a review for whatever reason, it will still be retained for internal use.
A note on privacy
In order to protect the privacy of students, reviews will be shown publicly along with only the student's status (Current or Future) and their campus (if known). No information about the student's name will be revealed. Only administrators will be able to see which student actually submitted the review.
What happens to reviews when a property is re-listed?
Reviews are attached to the property rather than the individual accommodation listing. So if a property is re-listed, the new listing will display any reviews from previous listings. Expired listings (i.e. those listed before a review was submitted) will also display reviews from any newer listings when viewed through admin, so you won't need to go hunting down the newest listing to see if it has been reviewed.