Recently we've had to reach out to a number of members because they were unintentionally abusing the reporting system, which is against the rules. Although we didn't punish any of these members, we felt it was important to clarify something about the reporting procedures in place here.
Whenever you report a post or a user, a new thread is created in a hidden forum which only staff have access to. The thread contains all the information that staff usually need to look into the issue: the reported user's name, their post (if applicable), the name of the member who reported, and the reason given, etc.
Staff have a duty to look into the report, discuss it, come to a decision, and then archive it. We don't keep reports in that forum for long, but rather move them to a separate archive. We do this so that we can see at a glance how many open reports there still are.
An issue that we run into from time to time is when a single person reports multiple posts by the same user for the same kind of violation (e.g. if a user is trolling the forums and a member reports 10 of their troll posts in quick succession). This situation is annoying and delays the staff's ability to respond quickly, as we have to deal with merging multiple reports which all cover the same violation.
If you are reporting a user for spam, you only need to report one of their posts (or alternatively, report their profile). We will look into their profile and recent posts in either case, so reporting every post they make is unnecessary. When reporting the post / profile, you can type a reason for the report, and feel free to mention that there are multiple other posts by the user which violate a rule. If you want to be extra helpful, after you've made the report, send a PM to a staff member (or staff members) and link us to as many posts as you want us to be aware of. We'll add those posts to the report and be able to discuss them at once.
Doing this will really help the staff out, as we can then dedicate more time to actually dealing with rule breakers rather than trying to make sense of multiple reports for the same thing!
Thanks for reading!
- Tiberius
P.S. I also want to be clear that people who continue to report multiple posts because they didn't read this message aren't going to get punished. We appreciate people reporting rule violations, and don't want to discourage that. Abuse of the reporting system has to be intentional for us to do anything about it.
Whenever you report a post or a user, a new thread is created in a hidden forum which only staff have access to. The thread contains all the information that staff usually need to look into the issue: the reported user's name, their post (if applicable), the name of the member who reported, and the reason given, etc.
Staff have a duty to look into the report, discuss it, come to a decision, and then archive it. We don't keep reports in that forum for long, but rather move them to a separate archive. We do this so that we can see at a glance how many open reports there still are.
An issue that we run into from time to time is when a single person reports multiple posts by the same user for the same kind of violation (e.g. if a user is trolling the forums and a member reports 10 of their troll posts in quick succession). This situation is annoying and delays the staff's ability to respond quickly, as we have to deal with merging multiple reports which all cover the same violation.
If you are reporting a user for spam, you only need to report one of their posts (or alternatively, report their profile). We will look into their profile and recent posts in either case, so reporting every post they make is unnecessary. When reporting the post / profile, you can type a reason for the report, and feel free to mention that there are multiple other posts by the user which violate a rule. If you want to be extra helpful, after you've made the report, send a PM to a staff member (or staff members) and link us to as many posts as you want us to be aware of. We'll add those posts to the report and be able to discuss them at once.
Doing this will really help the staff out, as we can then dedicate more time to actually dealing with rule breakers rather than trying to make sense of multiple reports for the same thing!
Thanks for reading!
- Tiberius
P.S. I also want to be clear that people who continue to report multiple posts because they didn't read this message aren't going to get punished. We appreciate people reporting rule violations, and don't want to discourage that. Abuse of the reporting system has to be intentional for us to do anything about it.
