Reporting Notification

[TylerD321]

I think it would be extremely helpful if there was a section that shows every post that you have reported and if action has been taken on the post. This would be extremely helpful for users being able to verify that a report has gone through. There is plenty of space for a new icon beside notifications and dms!

 

It would also be neat if action being taken on a post or reply that you have reported would be awarded a “point” for reputation. (But of course, you shouldn’t get points just for reporting a post if it is determined that the report was invalid.)

 

 

[filpo]

1 minute ago, TylerD321 said:

I think it would be extremely helpful if there was a section that shows every post that you have reported and if action has been taken on the post. This would be extremely helpful for users being able to verify that a report has gone through. There is plenty of space for a new icon beside notifications and dms!

 

It would also be neat if action being taken on a post or reply that you have reported would be awarded a “point” for reputation. (But of course, you shouldn’t get points just for reporting a post if it is determined that the report was invalid.)

good point

 

I also think there should be a section for where people have quoted or replied to your topics as it makes it much easier to see after a day or two who replied to your reply on a topic

[LogicalDrm]

14 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

It would also be neat if action being taken on a post or reply that you have reported would be awarded a “point” for reputation. (But of course, you shouldn’t get points just for reporting a post if it is determined that the report was invalid.)

Hard disagree. I don't think you should get cookies for normal behaviour. Would it increase reporting overall? Maybe. But I see it bringing more harmful nitpicking.

 

You get popup saying report has been sent. If you don't see it, you can try again. It will notify you if you try to report same post again.

 

11 minutes ago, filpo said:

I also think there should be a section for where people have quoted or replied to your topics as it makes it much easier to see after a day or two who replied to your reply on a topic

This is already a thing https://linustechtips.com/discover/content-started/. You can customize one where it only shows you those threads that have new posts since you last read them. Thought there's not particular one for quotes or mentions, they are within Notification settings.

 

***

 

Moderation standpoint. Some actions don't need to be really public or known. And since every situation is different, your view of what you report and actions taken/not taken may look very different than what it actually is. This also might bring forward some (false) thoughts about favoritism or cyberbullying. Moderation of members is private, but if you want to know where the line of accepted and not accepted content is, you can always PM and ask. If we receive many reports on things that are allowed (Hackingtosh, jailbreak, homebrew/emulation as piracy or twitch/youtube links in status updates as advertising), we contact you and let you know where the line is.

[TylerD321]

36 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

Hard disagree. I don't think you should get cookies for normal behaviour. Would it increase reporting overall? Maybe. But I see it bringing more harmful nitpicking.

 

I don’t think this is a very good argument as you are already given “cookies for normal behavior” for replying to content.

 

That being said, I don’t think this should be something public that everyone could see, but I know that the people who report the most posts are occasionally mentioned in official posts.

 

Even apps like Instagram give some feedback on when you report something in the notification area. It wouldn’t need to be overly specific just say “report received - action taken” or “report declined”. 
 

Edit: Added mention of report count.

 

 

Edited May 24, 2023 by TylerD321

[LogicalDrm]

3 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

That being said, I don’t think this should be something public that everyone could see, but I know that the people who report the most posts are occasionally mentioned in official posts.

I've never seen that. Nor would I hold that as achievement. My point was that I don't like the idea of getting something extra from helping to keep community nice and neat. Keeping things nice for all and clean/neat to use was my reason for reporting posts when I started here. Thats what I do elsewhere. "Report received" is pretty much what I need as I don't probably see what effect it has on larger scale.

 

Granted, I got offered moderation position since I reported some 50 posts to be moved per day.

 

3 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

Even apps like Instagram give some feedback on when you report something in the notification area. It wouldn’t need to be overly specific just say “report received - action taken” or “report declined”. 

The note Facebook sends back now is meak "Thanks, working to make community better." It used to be infuriating "This user is clearly spammer, but we don't think that since this is also message sent by bot". Blizzard has generic "We have taken actions, but can't tell you what and on who, but thanks". I don't need those, but I guess you do?

[TylerD321]

3 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

The note Facebook sends back now is meak "Thanks, working to make community better." It used to be infuriating "This user is clearly spammer, but we don't think that since this is also message sent by bot". Blizzard has generic "We have taken actions, but can't tell you what and on who, but thanks". I don't need those, but I guess you do?

To be fair I do enjoy immediate gratification. I just think it would be nice to visualize what impact that I (we?) have on the forums. I like numbers myself. It wouldn’t be an overly difficult thing to implement in my opinion and wouldn’t negatively impact the forums. The people who already report are going to keep doing it, and those who don’t, won’t. Realistically it would even be cool if there was a percentage of how many things you reported that actually deserved it. Like a 93% report accuracy or something.

 

In my head I see this as a personal spotify wrapped type of deal in LTT style.

 

7 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

I've never seen that. Nor would I hold that as achievement.

Did you happen to see the edit I made to that reply with a screenshot?

[LogicalDrm]

6 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

Did you happen to see the edit I made to that reply with a screenshot?

I did forgot about that. But would agree with Mortis that I would be reluctant to publish that number. Or position.

 

I don't have anything add here. Besides the negative effects gloryhunting usually brings, giving even "action/no-action" level information could be problematic since moderation of members is private.

[Spotty]

1 hour ago, filpo said:

I also think there should be a section for where people have quoted or replied to your topics as it makes it much easier to see after a day or two who replied to your reply on a topic

Please do not hijack posts with unrelated suggestions. If you would like to make an unrelated suggestion please create your own post.

[Spotty]

1 hour ago, TylerD321 said:

I think it would be extremely helpful if there was a section that shows every post that you have reported and if action has been taken on the post. This would be extremely helpful for users being able to verify that a report has gone through.

If you submit a report it will display a message confirming your report has been successfully submitted.

 

I did actually look at my Youtube Report History recently and like what you are suggesting it is a list of videos that I had reported for various reasons and I did find it interesting to see some of the videos I had reported had been updated saying they were removed or restricted. Providing additional feedback to people who have submitted reports might not be a bad idea. Though, I'm not sure if there's a good way for us to implement that style of reporting transparency.

 

For one, and this is based on my experience with the Youtube report history, if a person reports something and they don't get the outcome they were expecting when they reported the post it can be frustrating. Looking at my history it seems I reported several videos about people riding on moving trains for dangerous acts. Some videos were removed. Some were age restricted. Some are still showing live. As a normal member who isn't exposed to the decision making behind the scenes it's frustrating when things I reported appear to be handled inconsistently or not in line with their guidelines, though there may be reasons and nuances I don't understand or aren't visible to me for why each of those decisions was made.

If somebody reports something and then sees that no action was taken on the report it might frustrate them and discourage them from reporting further issues, or it might encourage them to engage in bad behaviour themselves with a "Well if they're going to allow that then I can get away with this!" attitude.

 

It could even cause issues if it shows as actioned yet the person reported isn't banned from the forum, the reporter might start complaining that they're not banned. "They broke the rules and the report shows it was actioned but they weren't banned! They're still posting! You need to ban them!" . We (moderators) are not going to explain what action we took or why every time somebody reports something.

 

As LogicalDRM has already touched on, we do try to handle any issues directly and discreetly with people. Even if people are doing the wrong thing we don't want to publicly shame them for it. And, to be frank, it's not really anybody else's business what discipline other people face. This forum isn't high drama where everybody is involved in other people's business.

 

 

2 hours ago, TylerD321 said:

It would also be neat if action being taken on a post or reply that you have reported would be awarded a “point” for reputation. (But of course, you shouldn’t get points just for reporting a post if it is determined that the report was invalid.)

I don't think receiving any reward for reporting posts will be a good thing. Worst case it might encourage people to try and find excuses to report posts. Aside from creating extra unnecessary work for the moderators, having a bunch of insignificant issues reported, especially when the outcome of that report needs to be disclosed, can lead to over-moderation which isn't a good experience for anyone. As a moderator I can tell you I don't want to feel pressured to take action just because I know the reporter is expecting to see it show up as actioned in their log, or deal with people complaining if it doesn't. Nobody wants the feeling that moderators are involved in everything you do on the forum and we don't want to be nit-picking everything people do either. Ideally most people using the forum will just go about posting normally and hopefully will have very little interaction with the moderation team acting in a moderator role.

 

 

While it isn't common behaviour, we do occasionally see people reporting other people's post out of spite or as a way to harass them. Seeing the outcome of those reports might cause further issues between those people, either being gratified that the person they don't like was disciplined in some way because of their reports or causing issues because we didn't take any action.

 

One common action taken on reported posts is for the content to be removed. If that content were to be actioned and removed it would no longer be accessible to you and would disappear from that list. This may end up with a lot of the content you report that is actioned being removed from the list, leaving a list of only the reports that were not actioned and giving the member the false impression that their reports are unhelpful or being ignored. Even if you just display the removed content as "<Not Available>" instead of the original reported content it wouldn't give the feedback that you're suggesting unless the person who reported it remembered what it was they reported and why, and if you already remember that information then you can just check to see if it has been deleted or has been locked or moved or whatever other action may be appropriate.

 

Also, we can be slow to act sometimes. We tend to aim for a good and fair resolution rather than a quick one. Thankfully the community is normally pretty chill. We can often afford to take time to deal with things and it's not too often things that need to be handled urgently. If there is an issue we do try to work with people to resolve it. For example if a post doesn't meet the Tech News Guidelines we might reach out to the poster and try to encourage them to update the post to meet the guidelines, which can take a few days if they're not a regular daily user and with differing timezones as we go back and forth. If you report something and you don't see it immediately updated it might give the impression that we're ignoring it when we're actually taking steps to deal with it but in the meantime it's still just sitting in the system as open so we can track it.

 

 

Most of those aren't insurmountable challenges and there might be ways to work around some of those issues, though I'm not really sure if the limited feedback that it would give would be worth it.

[OhYou_]

A system which publicly displays points added each time a user reports something could easily be used to track reports against your own posts with a strong estimate on who reports you. 

This is obviously a disaster. 

 

[colonel_mortis]

7 hours ago, TylerD321 said:

That being said, I don’t think this should be something public that everyone could see, but I know that the people who report the most posts are occasionally mentioned in official posts.

As your screenshot shows, disclosing specifics of moderation in general is not something that we're willing to do in general. That is the only time that we've done it, and that was someone asking for their own stats, which is not the same as announcing the people who report the most posts.

[TylerD321]

31 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

As your screenshot shows, disclosing specifics of moderation in general is not something that we're willing to do in general. That is the only time that we've done it, and that was someone asking for their own stats, which is not the same as announcing the people who report the most posts.

I just want to clarify, this post is not asking to report on other people’s information. I just would like to be able to see my own data numbers through some sort of page. 

 

1 hour ago, OhYou_ said:

A system which publicly displays points added each time a user reports something could easily be used to track reports against your own posts with a strong estimate on who reports you. 

This is obviously a disaster. 

 

 

[colonel_mortis]

1 hour ago, TylerD321 said:

I just want to clarify, this post is not asking to report on other people’s information. I just would like to be able to see my own data numbers through some sort of page. 

 

 

I think that side of things has been pretty well covered by other staff above, and I generally agree with what has already been said there. The fact that I pulled one person's stats for the year isn't representative of a general willingness to publish and especially promote stuff like that.