Content Integrity Policy

Our Approach to Content Integrity

Sportoso, has created a community where members can review and comment sport events, sport facilities, sport shops or sport equipment and read other member’s reviews. Once in a while, someone will try to game our system by attempting to post a fake review, so we thought it would be helpful to share our approach, our policies, and the actions we take to identify, block, and remove fraudulent reviews. Here's what we believe.

We believe the best sport advice comes from other sportsmen.

Sportoso members can submit reviews of their experiences at sport events, sport center, sport shop or sport equipment, from all over the world.

We believe in "the right to write."

Sportoso community has a wealth of valuable experience, and every one of our users should feel confident sharing their opinions. When you attend an event, access a sport facility, buy a sport equipment in a shop or you try a new equipment, you have a fundamental right to talk about that experience with others. We are immensely proud of the community we’ve built which helps customers do just that.

We believe every experience counts. If there is a group participating in a sporting event, train in a sports center, buy in a sport shop or try out new sport   equipment we believe that all of them should have a voice. That's what Sportoso stands for.

Because we believe in promoting personal experiences, we do not take lightly the decision to remove a review from our site. It might be easier to give in to censorship and remove reviews that a business owner disagrees with. But it goes against what we stand for, which is the right for genuine consumers to share their experiences.

In keeping with this philosophy, while we do require reviewers to certify that they are reviewing their own experiences before they can submit their review to Sportoso, we don’t seek third-party verification.

We believe that everyone should play by the same rules. Businesses are not able to influence Sportoso to improve their reviews or ratings.

We have unique processes for moderating the content submitted to TripAdvisor, as well as proprietary algorithms that calculate a business' daily rank within our Traveller Ranking. Those processes and algorithms are applied in the same way to all content, complaints and properties. We never have and never will give our advertisers or anyone else preferential treatment.

We have unique processes for moderating the content submitted to Sportoso. The order in which the reviews appear is chronological and is applied in the same way to all contents.

We believe that businesses who don't play by the rules should be penalized.

Businesses know that consumers rely heavily on reviews when making decisions on their sport plans/activities. Unfortunately, it may happen that some unscrupulous businesses will try to improve their ratings to attract more consumers, positively reviewing their own structure (including engaging other people willing to do it for them) or negatively reviewing their competitors

These activities constitute fraud. Posting fake reviews violates the Sportoso Terms of Use, as well as unfair competition and/or consumer protection laws in many countries. We invest massive amounts of time, effort and money into identifying and blocking fraudulent activity on our site.

How Sportoso identifies and blocks fraud

• We have experience identifying what normal reviews and reviewing behaviour tend to look like on our platform. We're experts at spotting patterns of fraudulent activity.
• We run reviews to identify moderation or integrity issues prior to publication. This process allows Sportoso to analyse and categorise massive amounts of data quickly and thoroughly.
• We have a staff working to manage content and to identify, block and remove fraud.
• Once reviews are published, we allow business owners and community members to flag content for our review if they believe it is fraudulent. All reports from our community and owners are reviewed and analyzed by our team of content specialists.
• We proactively engage with companies trying to hire people to write reviews as well as property owners attempting to buy fake reviews in order to catch those that try to circumvent our systems.

How Sportoso penalises businesses found to engage in fraudulent activity

• We block or remove the fake reviews.
• We aggressively pursue companies that offer to boost a business' reputation by writing fake reviews on its behalf. When we catch them, we remove all of the fake reviews they've posted, and we penalise their clients.

You may be surprised that Sportoso doesn’t simply remove the listing on our site for a business caught engaging in review fraud. In fact, that's exactly what some of these businesses want us to do, so they can prevent consumers from researching and commenting on them. But we believe consumers have the right to know what other Sportoso users are saying.

Finally, we believe it's important for our community to be informed.