How verification and anonymity work

Last updated: October 12, 2026

DormTea is anonymous to other students and visitors, not to DormTea itself. Here is what we keep behind the scenes, what everyone can see, and how we handle problems. Our Privacy Policy has the full legal detail.

How verification works

• Enter your .edu email and we send a 6-digit code that expires in 10 minutes and works once. Entering it signs you in on that browser for up to 30 days.
• You can also sign in with Google, as long as the account has a verified email address ending in .edu. We receive only that email address, not your name, photo or contacts. Alumni who kept their school address are welcome.
• This proves you can read email at an address containing ".edu". It does not check that you are currently enrolled or which dorm you lived in, so alumni or staff addresses could also pass.
• Each account gets one review per dorm. Rating a dorm again replaces your earlier review.

What DormTea keeps internally

• Your email and school (filled in from your email domain where we can).
• Which account wrote each review, photo, helpful vote and flag, so we can enforce one review per dorm, stop duplicate votes and handle abuse. Someone with access to our database could see this link. We do not show it anywhere on the site, and our admin dashboard shows reviews and flagged comments without their authors.
• The optional "which floor?" answer, which is stored but never displayed.
• If you arrived through a club or Ambassador link, a short code for that link is stored on your account. It is never displayed, and clubs only ever receive totals (and only once a link has at least 5 reviews), never who wrote what.
• Standard hosting logs (such as IP address and timing) for security, and anonymous daily totals of page views, accounts and reviews that are deleted after 90 days.

What is visible publicly

• On a review: scores, tags, your comment, the date, and the name "Anonymous Student".
• Optional details you choose to add: class year, room type, room size and when you lived there. In a small dorm these could narrow down who you are, so skip them if that worries you.
• The number of Helpful votes, not who voted.
• Photos and captions, with no uploader name. We do not strip hidden photo metadata such as location, so remove it before uploading if it matters.
• Never shown: your email, your account, your votes or your floor.

Reporting and moderation

• Any signed-in student can flag a review as Inaccurate, Harassment or abuse, Spam or fake review, or Other (once per review, up to 20 flags a day).
• A flag does not remove a review or change a dorm's score. While a flag is open, that review is kept out of the homepage's featured sections (such as Latest tea), but it stays on the dorm's page. The site owner reviews flags by hand and can dismiss the flag or delete the review. We are a small team and cannot promise a response time.

Personal details in reviews

• Our Site Guidelines and Terms prohibit naming or identifying other people. We do not automatically scan or redact comments, so please leave out names, room numbers and roommates' details. Problems are handled after the fact when someone flags them or emails dormtea@gmail.com.
• You can edit your review by rating the dorm again, or delete it yourself any time while signed in, from your My Reviews page or from the review itself. Deleting a review also removes its helpful votes and flags. To remove your whole account, email dormtea@gmail.com or use the request form on the Do Not Sell My Personal Information page; account requests are handled manually.
• We do not currently sell or share personal information, show third-party ads, or use advertising or analytics cookies. Our Privacy Policy will be updated before that changes.