Automatic approval checks

May 17, 2010

You might have encountered one or two troublesome accommodation providers who you'd prefer to keep out of your database, but despite your best efforts they keep returning (with various pseudonyms and disguises) to cause trouble.

To make it easier to spot these troublemakers, I've added in some automatic approval checks to warn you when there's something suspicious about a listing. They'll also let you know when a provider has a good track record and can be trusted.


As you can see in this screen shot, each listing up for approval gets an overall score indicating how confident you can be about approving it. Click the "why?" button to get more information about why the listing was scored that way.

I don't want to make it easier for these people to get around the automatic approval checks so I won't reveal everything we're checking here. But there are a number of algorithms being run which produce weighted scores. I'll be monitoring this to see if we can add more or tweak the algorithms to make them more effective.

Of course automatic checks will never be as good as human judgement so you'll still have to click 'approve' or 'reject', sorry ;).