Most reviews are 4 or 5 stars from happy customers. You don’t need to read each one before it publishes; they don’t need your moderation; they just need to land.
The other 10% or so are the ones worth a look. Sometimes it’s a genuine 2-star you want to respond to before it goes live. Sometimes it’s spam that slipped past the form. Sometimes it’s a customer asking a support question instead of writing a review.
Trustie’s moderation is a star-threshold auto-approver paired with a pending list.
How it works
Set an auto-approve threshold: 3 stars, 4 stars, whatever fits your tolerance. Reviews at or above the threshold publish immediately. Reviews below it land in the moderation queue, marked pending, where you decide.
The queue is a list in admin: reviewer name, product, star rating, review body, submission date. Approve, reject, or trash with one click per review. Approved reviews show up in the public listings the next time a customer loads the page.
Same workflow across review types
The moderation queue treats product reviews, testimonials, and site reviews the same. Whatever the source of the review, if it’s below your auto-approve threshold, it shows up in the same pending list. One workflow, one place to triage.
Or hold everything for a human read
The threshold is configurable. If you want every review to wait for a human read before publishing (a regulated category, sensitive content, or a shop building from zero reviews and wanting to vet each one), set the threshold to a value above your max rating. No review’s stars will meet the threshold, so everything lands in the queue regardless of rating.
Why shops turn it on
The auto-approve threshold solves the workflow problem that bites a lot of small shops: either every review waits forever for moderation (because the shop owner has actual work to do) or no review is moderated and the occasional bad-faith one gets through. The threshold means the boring 90% just works while the interesting 10% gets your attention.
Why shops turn it on with Pro
Free’s moderation handles the star-threshold rule and the manual queue. Trustie Pro adds keyword flagging (route reviews to moderation if they contain words you care about, useful for regulated products), required-moderation override per product or category (override the threshold for sensitive items), and an owner-response workflow (reply to a review and your response renders under it on the product page).