What she wanted to do was warn others.

In Ethiopia last October, the 30-year-old aid worker went on a group kayaking trip, expecting an enjoyable adventure. Instead it turned into a harrowing ordeal: The woman woke up in her hotel room in the early morning, she said, and found one of the tour guides on top of her. He had broken into her room and raped her, she said, before her roommate woke up and helped restrain the man. The woman, who goes by K — the sound of the first letter of her name — asked that her real name not be used.

K went through the motions — multiple medical exams, a police report, informing her employer — and was medically evacuated from the country. After weeks of therapy, she decided to warn others by writing a review on TripAdvisor. What she assumed would take a few minutes has exploded into a public battle with one of the biggest companies in the travel world.

K said her review wasn’t approved by TripAdvisor because it didn’t meet the platform’s policies, which require all reviews to be written in the first person and posted from the TripAdvisor account of the person who had the experience. K said that would open her up to possible harassment online and expose her identity to colleagues and Ethiopian authorities, who are investigating the incident.

Since then, a petition calling for the company to change its policy has gained more than 500,000 signatures. TripAdvisor announced new changes this week, but K and activists behind the petition say they fall short of what’s needed.