We included detailed instructions as to how to create an account and post a review.

Some of these customers already had an account at wp.org. Their reviews are still there.

For the others, however, all the reviews were deleted. I’m assuming automatic moderation, but we didn’t get a single notification. I was actually lucky to notice thanks to a user that told me he couldn’t see his review from earlier that day on the page.

Two things –
1. I understand how it might automatically feel weird to see a bunch of reviews popping up, but that’s how email blasts work. Feels kind of strange that the reviews would be deleted without any kind of escalation to human moderation (?)
2. These are all real-life customers with real-life emails (that typically have several years of history) – how was that not factored into the moderation? Simply googling the login emails should give you a pretty accurate sense of true / fake review, so there has to be a way to improve this…

And on to my question: What can I do to get these reviews back? Preferably without asking anything more from our customers that were nice enough to take the time to post a review in the first place…? More than willing to discuss this!

And on to my question: What can I do to get these reviews back? Preferably without asking anything more from our customers that were nice enough to take the time to post a review in the first place…? More than willing to discuss this!

You don’t get them back. They were deleted for cause.

@neeraj_slit You will be getting an email from the plugins team, possibly today but perhaps tomorrow. They’re going to get a report on those reviews and you will be contacted as a result of that.