Our Review & Community Guidelines
As part of the Go Overseas community, you’re contributing to an impactful resource for people all over the globe to search for their first (or next) international experience. We allow members to contribute to the Go Overseas site through comments on our blog articles, and through reviews of programs in which they have participated.
Whether it’s a volunteer program, a semester abroad, learning a new language, completing an internship, or earning a teaching certification, we want to hear from you first-hand through your reviews and comments. We showcase your experience via a quantitative rating system, qualitative comments, and the option to upload photos and a video.
Thousands of users read the hundreds of reviews and comments that are posted every week. With that in mind, please ensure your content is:
Appropriate
What excites us most is hearing from our passionate community about their experiences overseas -- we love reading your stories, hearing about things you learned, and what you might have done differently.
Many of the reviews and comments that come in every day are positive and well-rated, but we know that not everyone has an A+ experience (after all, international education is supposed to be challenging and an opportunity for personal growth). We welcome critical reviews and comments, so long as they adhere to our guidelines. We reserve the right to remove references to illegal activities and allegations against a provider and/or activity. Laws across the globe vary greatly.
- Photos: This is one of our favorite parts of your reviews -- a picture really is worth a thousand words. However, any photo or caption depicting illegal or inappropriate content will be removed. Rule of thumb: if you don’t want Grandma seeing it, don’t post it.
- Video: Whether you’re scuba diving, capturing the view on top of the Eiffel Tower or salsa dancing with local friends, we adhere to the same guidelines. Please keep it appropriate and respect the privacy of others appearing in your video.
Pssst! We often feature our favorite photos and video content on social media and in our articles and newsletters!
Well-Written
Often, the more excited you are about your experience, the less time you spend spot-checking for spelling and grammar. You can hardly wait to get all your thoughts out, or you’re remembering things as you write.
We love this! It’s so fun to read -- but unfortunately misspelled words aren’t (just ask our editor / in-house grammar queen!). Be sure to glance back and read over what you’ve written before you post it.
Tip: Put yourself in the shoes of a person who knows nothing about the program and how they would experience your review with no prior knowledge. Ask yourself, is this helpful to them? If not, take the time to insert some clarifying information. This will make your review even stronger.
Unbiased
All review and comment content must be first-hand experience. We never post content on behalf of reviewers or allow providers to post their own reviews. Every review on Go Overseas has been left by a participant (something we take great pride in!). Each reviewer must have participated in a minimum of two weeks of the program (or half the program if less than two weeks). Pre-departure experiences will not count as participation in the program, however, Go Overseas reserves the right to publish a pre-departure review only when the participant provides proof of payment into the program AND we find the information in the review is relevant to our community. We reserve the right to remove any review that is not first-hand experience or has been left on behalf of someone else. We reserve the right to ask for proof of participation in the program being reviewed at any point in time.
We do allow parents to review programs if their child is under 18 years old at the time when they completed the program. Parents cannot review programs if their child is 18 or older at the time at which their child participated on the program.
Applicable
All reviews and comments must be relevant to the provider, program, or article on which the review or comment is posted. We also expect you to make your best effort to leave an articulate review. We reserve the right to remove reviews or comment that are unrelated to the program being reviewed.
Sometimes reviews are left in the wrong place and we'll move the review to a better location. Naturally, listings change over time so we might move a review to a different program offered by the same provider.
We'd encourage you to leave one review per program that you complete. If you've participated in multiple programs abroad, you're able to leave one review for each of those individual programs. Providers and Universities are allotted one response per participant review.
Adhering to the one review per program policy above, if your organization partners with a separate company (an in-country partner for example) you are solely allowed to review the company whom you paid your program fee to. If the program fee is split, the review belongs to the provider whom you were initially recruited by.
In our comments, we do not allow the following activities: recruiting, personal attacks or abuse, hate speech, vulgarity, trolling, or solicitation of services or products. If we find comments like this, we reserve the right to remove them without warning. Therefore, please leave comments with questions and concerns which we may be able to help you address; do not leave spam or sales comments. We also do not allow you to share personal information such as your phone number or address in comments, and may moderate comments to remove this information.
Unique
All content must be your own intellectual property and cannot be copied from another source or repurposed from anywhere else. We monitor for duplicated content very closely and will catch anything that is copy/pasted from another website. You have wonderful and unique thoughts -- we want to hear them!
We do allow personal blog links within reviews if relevant, but the content cannot be repurposed or focused on promoting a community member's brand or business.
All reviews must meet the minimum content requirements. We reserve the right to remove reviews that contain symbols to bolster the minimum character count.
Privacy Policy
Please respect the privacy of your fellow participants and partner organizations. We reserve the right to remove specific mention of names, partner organizations, media, irrelevant information and defamatory comments (while still maintaining the integrity of your review).
Your personal information as a reviewer will not be shared with third-party organizations (or the providers) unless you grant us permission to do so. We allow for reviews to be left anonymously or under an alias name; while maintaining the right to ask for program enrollment verification at any point.