Get rid of the “Report” link under comments and posts. Some possibilities, in decreasing order of preference:
Just remove it completely, and handle spam and other crap by giving the moderators a page where they can easily see the recent comments that got a lot of downvotes (if they don’t already have one)
Rename it “Flag” so it doesn’t get confused with “Reply” (I bet that happens more often than people reporting spam)
Remove it for any post or comment older than a day, or for any post/comment that has positive karma.
Give users an option in their preferences (on by default) to hide the link.
It’s good to have an option for the “something is going on here that probably shouldn’t, a human moderator should take a closer look” case, even if it’s not needed that often. I’ve used it on some spammers and an occasional drive-by gibberish trolling.
Calling it “flag” instead of “report” would help with the confusion with “reply”, but on the other hand it’s less clear what “flag” means. Since most users can safely ignore the option anyway, this is probably a smaller problem than confusion with “reply”, so supporting this one.
Since the site opened I have found the need for the Report button a total of zero times. And that is hardly due to lack of participation. I certainly wouldn’t mind it gone.
Get rid of the “Report” link under comments and posts. Some possibilities, in decreasing order of preference:
Just remove it completely, and handle spam and other crap by giving the moderators a page where they can easily see the recent comments that got a lot of downvotes (if they don’t already have one)
Rename it “Flag” so it doesn’t get confused with “Reply” (I bet that happens more often than people reporting spam)
Remove it for any post or comment older than a day, or for any post/comment that has positive karma.
Give users an option in their preferences (on by default) to hide the link.
A vote for the flag rename.
It’s good to have an option for the “something is going on here that probably shouldn’t, a human moderator should take a closer look” case, even if it’s not needed that often. I’ve used it on some spammers and an occasional drive-by gibberish trolling.
Calling it “flag” instead of “report” would help with the confusion with “reply”, but on the other hand it’s less clear what “flag” means. Since most users can safely ignore the option anyway, this is probably a smaller problem than confusion with “reply”, so supporting this one.
Since the site opened I have found the need for the Report button a total of zero times. And that is hardly due to lack of participation. I certainly wouldn’t mind it gone.
I may have used it two or three times on spammers selling jewelry or pandora shoes, but that problem eventually got solved by different karma rules.