Goodreads reveals changes to prevent 'review bombing'

Goodreads has revealed recent changes it has made to limit ratings and reviews to prevent “review bombing".

The American social cataloguing website announced the changes on its website in a post entitled "Working Together to Protect the Authenticity of Ratings and Reviews on Goodreads".

The statement described how the company “prohibits reviews that are not relevant to the book, harass readers or authors, or attempt to artificially deflate or inflate the overall rating of the book”.

The Amazon subsidiary said: “We continue to invest in improvements to quickly detect and moderate content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines […] we’ve strengthened account verification to block potential spammers, expanded our customer service team to accelerate our response time, and added more ways for our members to report problematic content.

“Earlier this year, we launched the ability to temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity that violate our guidelines, including instances of ‘review bombing’.”

Goodreads said it is currently in the process of removing ratings and reviews added during times of previous unusual activity that violates guidelines.

The site also urged readers to report behaviour which does not meet its reviews or community guidelines.