This news bit was prompted by an email from a student, and I wanted to publish my response publicly.

The inquiry was if the reviews were filtered in any way, as the writer had seen few "bad" reviews. The text of my response follows.

So far, there has been no filtering at all, I haven't even had anyone "report" a review. However, I do reserve that right in the terms of service for the site:

Spamming and hate content will get you banned immediately. Swear words and highly offensive content will get you banned almost as quick. This is an open forum for exchanging factual information and tasteful opinions, not for venting against a good instructor who failed you because you didn't do any homework.

OurUNO and it's guardians have absolute final say on the creation, deletion and editing of everything posted on this site. We have the right to use anything you post as we see fit with or without attribution. You can edit and delete your own content as you see fit, but have no guarantee of this right.

I entirely agree with you, bad instructors should be outed. I'm not afraid of libel charges, I believe that I qualify as a service provider under the Safe Harbor rules of the DMCA [1]. However, I do believe there are moral boundaries you can cross without it being libel (racism, sexism, etc.), and I wanted to reserve the right to remove or censor that kind of content.

Trust me, I had some terrible professors in college, and that is why I built the site. However, you have to keep in mind that it's entirely user generated, so what's there is what's there.

It's not all "good" reviews though, here's the current breakdown of reviews:

1 Star  :  28   6.25%
2 Stars :  31   6.91%
3 Stars :  66  14.73%
4 Stars : 124  27.67%
5 Stars : 199  44.41%
Total   : 448

So, professors are getting bad reviews, but not in the same ratio as those getting good ones. I'm not sure what the reasons for that are. People may be less enthusiastic to down-rate someone as they are to up-rate them. Good professors tend to instill loyalty in their students, which could explain it. There is also a definite power structure in a college classroom. You may not respect the professor, but they are an authority and you respect the weapons they can bring to bear on your GPA, even subconsciously that could slow you down.

I would encourage you to write the bad reviews if you think that professors deserve them. And encourage others to do the same. Until that sort of behavior propagates, I would take OurUNO reviews with a grain of salt, read them thoroughly and use your own judgment. However, please rest assured that I am a strong proponent of digital rights and anonymity. It's not part of the Terms of Service (though I will consider adding it) but I do state the following on the About page:

All reviews submitted to OurUNO will be posted anonymously. We collect your UNO user name during a review for two reasons. One is so that we can be sure that all reviews posted to the site come from genuine UNO students. Two is so that we can deal with blocking and banning students who break the rules.

Your information will never be given out to anyone unless subpoenaed, which they never should be unless you are writing libelous reviews which would be removed and get you banned anyway.

I hope that helps, and I'm sorry it took me a few days to write back, I don't check this email as much as I used to. Any suggestions you have are appreciated.

Okay, I've rebuilt the rewrite rules, so we should be good to go now!

If you find any bugs though, let me know!

Thanks!