Trust & moderation

How we keep this honest.

A review economy only works if reviews are real. This page is the full picture of how RepoRanker prevents fake reviews, self-dealing, and pay-to-rank, and what to do if you spot something that looks off.

The four guardrails

48-hour dispute window

Every review is held for 48 hours after submission before it goes live and the reviewer earns 10 credits. The reviewed maintainer can dispute during the window. Disputed reviews don't release and credits aren't granted.

GitHub-only sign-in

Every account is tied to a public GitHub developer profile. No email-only signups, no anonymous accounts. Bad-faith reviews are publicly attributable to a real developer identity.

No self-dealing

You cannot review your own repos. You cannot review the same repo twice. Boost purchases are visibly marked on the leaderboard so paid placement is always identifiable, never hidden.

Deterministic ranking

The default Top sort is published in the rules: active boosts, then GitHub stars, then newest submission. Same inputs, same order, for everyone, all the time.

Transparency report

We will publish dispute outcomes here once the sample is large enough to be honest about it. Until then, every dispute is decided by the published rules in this page and on content policy, and any visitor can email abuse@reporanker.com to report a bad-faith review.

What counts as a valid review

At least 800 characters of original written text. The system rejects anything shorter at submission time.
Substantive engagement with the repo: what it does, how well it does it, who it's for, where it could improve. Generic praise ("great project!") is treated as low-effort and is dispute-eligible.
Honest assessment, including criticism. Negative reviews are welcome and protected as long as they're grounded in the actual repo.
No copy-paste or AI-generated filler. Reviews that look like LLM output or are reused across repos are dispute-eligible and may result in account flagging.

What is dispute-eligible

A maintainer can dispute a review during the 48-hour window for any of the following reasons:

Low-effort or under-substantive content (e.g. padded out to 800 chars without saying anything real).
Off-topic content unrelated to the repo.
Demonstrably false claims about the project.
Personal attacks on the maintainer rather than the work.
AI-generated or templated text reused across multiple repos.
Spam, marketing copy, or links that don't belong in a review.

Disagreement with criticism is not grounds for dispute. A negative but honest review will not be removed.

What happens to bad-faith reviewers

Account-level consequences scale with pattern, not single incidents:

First valid dispute: review is removed, no credits are granted, no other action.
Repeated valid disputes: the account is flagged for review and may lose the ability to earn credits temporarily.
Confirmed pattern of fake or paid reviews: account banned, all outstanding credits voided, reviews removed.
Coordinated review trading or sock-puppet behavior: same as above, applied across all linked accounts.

Why the leaderboard is not pay-to-rank

Boosts are opt-in visibility, not opt-in ranking. A leaderboard boost pins your repo to the top of the feed for 24 hours, but every visitor can see that it's boosted (the row is marked) and the underlying organic position is unchanged. When the boost expires, you drop back to where you were.

Credits, the in-app currency, can only be earned by reviewing. They cannot be purchased. You can pay USD for boosts directly, but the credit pool is exclusively a reward for contributing reviews. That keeps the supply side honest: the people doing the most reviewing have the most ability to boost.

Found a bad-faith review or repo?

If you're the maintainer of the reviewed repo, use the dispute button on the review during the 48-hour window. If you're a third party, or the dispute window has closed, email abuse@reporanker.com with a link to the review or repo and a one-line description of the issue. We respond within 48 hours and act on confirmed cases within seven days.

Related reading: Leaderboard ranking rules · Content policy · How credits work · FAQ