Problem with the reporting function

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I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but we have seen cases where a poster says they reported a post and none of the mods saw the report. In fact, we couldn’t even find them when we looked.

We think have some sort of bug. The staff are trying to pin down what’s going on and how to fix it.

Most reports are going through. But if you’ve reported a post, and haven’t gotten any reply in a day or two, please pm one or more of the mods directly.

Also, if you think this has happened to you, please let me know, as I’m trying to piece together the details, and your details might help.

Thanks

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Are all reports responded to here? Because that was not a feature of the last place.

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By default, when a mod accepts or rejects a report, the system gives a canned response. So typically you will get feedback. That’s something I really like about Discourse – in the old software, it was often burdensome to reply to the poster, and then you had to think about what to say. And I think posters found it frustrating that it felt like reports just fell into a black hole sometimes.

Of course, there’s still the problem that the mods may spend some time deciding what to do. And once a mod “accepts” or “rejects” a report, the report is hidden by the system, because hey, you’ve already dealt with it, right? That’s probably my least favorite thing about Discourse moderation. It’s really a PITA to find stuff that’s been resolved. It is possible, but it’s not easy and I’m still struggling with that. So if the mods are discussing something you may not get feedback in the interim.

I think it’s also possible for a mod to ignore or delete a report, in which case you might not get feedback at all. But I’m not sure.

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I believe we had someone with mod authority hitting ignore on reported posts thinking it was just them ignoring the posts when actually it means ignore for everyone. Then the other mods don’t see the report.

Fixed that, then we brought on new moderators who did the same thing, so reported posts weren’t getting seen by the other mods.

So not a bug I think, just mods doing mod things without understanding the function. Not pointing fingers but the second time wasn’t me.

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That’s a Feeble excuse, Mr Crustacean.

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Actually, this may only be true for reports that are “something else”.

One of the things the mods need to do is to practice throwing flags and seeing how the system works. We are working on getting a mudroom set up for the mods to report each other’s posts and test how stuff works. Some of the moderation features in this software are frustratingly non-obvious.