Moderation and the review-request email

Last updated July 10, 2026

How review moderation works

The rule. Any review carrying a photo or video is held for moderation, always – even if your WordPress discussion settings auto-approve comments. Text-only reviews follow your normal comment settings. A customer photo never goes public without a human look; that guarantee is the point of the Moderation tab.

Where. The Moderation tab lists every waiting review with its pictures and video right there – nothing to download, video plays in place. You also get an email notification (the “Moderation notification email” setting) when a media review arrives.

Your three choices per review

1. Approve and publish – the review appears on the product page, media included, photos as click-to-zoom thumbnails.
2. Reject – the review goes to the trash and its media files are permanently deleted from your site. Use this for spam, abuse, or images you cannot publish.
3. Remove this file (under each photo or video) – deletes just that file and keeps the review. Use it when the words are fine but one image is not.

What approval does not do: it never edits the customer’s text. If a review needs a text edit, approve it and edit the comment on the normal WordPress Comments screen, so the change is traceable there.

How the review-request email works

This email is where reviews actually come from – almost no customer returns to review a product unprompted. The flow:

1. An order is marked completed (by you or your fulfillment flow).
2. The plugin schedules one email for that order, dated “completion plus your delay” (default 14 days – the customer should have the product in hand and have worn or used it). The order’s notes record the scheduling.
3. When the date arrives, the email is sent to the order’s billing address through your site’s normal email system: your introduction text, then each purchased product with a direct “write your review” link, signed off with your store name. The order’s notes record the send – or the exact reason it was skipped.

The guarantees

• One email per order, ever. The sent email is recorded on the order itself. Completing the order twice, refund dances, or plugin restarts never produce a second email. Orders completed while the feature was off are not emailed later.
• Verified buyers. Each product link in the email carries a signed proof-of-purchase marker, so a review arriving through it can be trusted as coming from a real buyer.
• Reliable sending. Scheduling uses the store’s background task system – the same one WooCommerce uses for its own delayed jobs – not the visit-triggered timer. With a real server cron (standard on Smart WP Labs setups), scheduled emails go out on time whether or not anyone visits the site.
• Delay changes affect future orders only. Already-scheduled emails keep their original date.

Wording that works

Keep the subject short, personal, and honest (“How is your new ring?”); ALL CAPS and exclamation marks hurt deliverability. In the introduction, thank them, mention that a photo makes the review more helpful, and write like a person. After saving, press Send a test email to me – it builds the email from your most recent completed order (or sample products on a brand-new store) and sends it to your own address. It never emails a customer and marks nothing as sent, so real sends are unaffected.

Troubleshooting the pipeline

• An email did not go out: open the order and read its notes first – every step and every skip reason is recorded there. If the notes say it was sent but nothing arrived, the suspect is your site’s email transport: check your SMTP plugin’s log, then spam folders.
• Reviews arrive but without media: confirm the media master switch is on; turning it off closes the submission door for new uploads everywhere (existing published media stays visible).
• Videos refused: the customer’s file exceeds the size limit, or your hosting’s upload limit is lower than the plugin’s setting – the error message tells the customer the actual ceiling.

For headless storefronts

Every feature – submitting reviews with media, reading approved reviews, moderating – is also available over the REST API under /wp-json/swpl-reviews/v1, for stores that run a separate storefront app. Public reads return approved reviews with media URLs; public submits accept the same fields and limits as the classic form, with any media forcing the review to pending; moderation requires an administrator. The plugin’s built-in Help contains the developer guide, and every error is a standard REST error object that says what to fix.