Bitcoin Forum

Recently (since a month or so), I started to get involved in reporting useless posts to moderators (spamming, shilling etc.). Given the fact that I reported a lot of posts lately (for example, I reported once ~1500 posts in less than 24h), I also encountered some difficulties, therefore I'm suggesting some improvements of this process, as it follows:

1. It would be nice to add a "Report" button in the page where all the posts / topics of an user are displayed

Why is that? Well, if you want to report multiple posts of a single user; then if you open the link "Latest posts of XXX"; then if you click on each post of the respective user to open the posts in different tabs, a bug and a problem may occur. When a post is opened in a new tab, it usually is the one from the top of the respective tab. However, this doesn't happen in all cases (this being the bug): sometimes, the new opened post / tab is not the one from the top, being instead displayed at the middle of the page or anywhere else. If such situation occurs, you may report the post from the top of the new tab, although this is not the post which should be reported. In some cases (if the post is good), then the report is bad. In other cases, the report can be bad for for other reason: for reporting a duplicate post (this being the problem, but also determined by the bug). How this can happen? Imagine that inside a topic an user has multiple posts and each one should be reported (e.g. continuous shilling of a site). In case multiple tabs are opened for each such post, if the mentioned bug occur and the posts opened in new tabs are not shown at the top part of the page, then you may select to report the post from the top of the new opened tab, but this post could be actually a post opened also in another tab. This situation (caused by the bug), may lead to have your report flagged as bad for being duplicate. So you report a shilling post (which should be reported); but you get in the situation of reporting it twice, although you didn't want this to happen.

Besides, this report button added to each posts / topics of any user would also make the reporting process more convenient, as it would be easier to directly click on a report button listed under each post / topic, compared to opening each post / topic in new tabs.

2. The reporting process is identified as posting and it follows the posting rules

When you open multiple posts in new tabs in order to report them all, you will be hindered by the time limit for consecutive reports. As I can understand, this message is the same for posting consecutive posts, and it is governed by the following rule:


However, this is a reporting process, not a posting process. Thus, if you are could be really fast at reporting multiple posts in a given time frame, you are stopped by the above mentioned code, which for some reason applies also during reporting posts, instead of being applied only for posting. Of course, the amount of time between consecutive reports gets higher, if the reporter's activity is low. In my case it is set at 8 seconds. And I received the respective error message many times, as I could make reports in a time lesser than 8 seconds. Now imagine how much would have to wait a member with 100 activity points or less. [/i]That member may have good intentions and help keeping the forum clean, but if he has to wait ages in order to report 100 posts he will not do it anymore.[/i]

In my case, to be more precise: for reporting all those 1500 posts in less than 24h, I needed 1500 (posts) x 8 (seconds between each report) = 12.000 seconds (200 minutes). Of course this was only the calculated time. In reality all becomes more slower due to various external aspects (change the message for a report / you close a tab accidentally then you have to reopen it etc.).

What I'm trying to say is that: if there was no time limit between consecutive reports, this entire process would be more convenient. Or, at least, if the restrictions would be decreased (e.g. 3 seconds between reports).

3. More mods are needed for analyzing the reported posts

As far as I could see, the mods can't keep the pace with the reporting process. I finished those ~1500 reports a few days ago but I still have almost 1000 unhandled reports. I believe there are too few mods inside the forum and they are overwhelmed with all their duties, which don't include only analyzing reports. This forum has over 2 millions of users, from which, if I remember well, more than 100.000 active. Even if all these users would make 1 (just one) report, the mods would be flooded with 100.000 reports. I'm not sure how many mods are there, but I think they are less than 30.

And, as I can see, they are too few for all their activities. For example, when I was in the frenzy of reporting, I was contacted by 3dOOM which kindly asked me to not report all the posts of each user, although all should be deleted, as I am opening too many reports.

That being said, I'd also suggest to increase the mods number.

You have discuss this problem here 1 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5223412.msg54478348#msg54478348) and got answered by @o_e_l_e_o

1. Use this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5101823.0

2. Any website needs some limitations. It's just good practice besides any other benefit.

:)

My suggestions are different than what I discussed / is discussed in the respective topic...read them again :)


Wow, thank you! I had not any idea about the existence of this script! This is a great feature, thanks again!

In addition to cyrus script which suggested above by Rizzrack, you can use the script made by suchmoon. (Visit the link below.)
[HACK] One-click mod report, not for the faint of heart  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5103488.msg49475506#msg49475506)

There is no bug.
The post you open is shown at top of the page unless the post is located at bottom of the page(usually one of the last three posts of a page). It's impossible to scroll down, so such post shown at top of the page.

My reports are usually handled in less than 24 hours. Sometimes they are handled in less than 1 hour. I am sure number of posts reported per day is much lower than your assumption.

           Suggestion number 1

With that applied judging a bad or good post that need to be thrashed away by moderator can be inaccurate, before you report a Post or say it bad you should see the thread, see the OP and see what is being discussed, a post may be bad to you but good as to the thread.

3. What's the rush? They will handle those reports eventually. It probably wouldn't make much sense to hire more mods to deal with peak demand that may happen very rarely. However there have been some suggestions to make certain reports more urgent (e.g. malware) so that they don't get buried under a bunch of regular spam reports. That might be useful.

You're welcome. Use it wisely tho...
Most of the times context is essential and there is a clear lack of it just looking at the post history.

Also reporting a user's entire post history might not be the best course of action.
 - may conclude you are doing it just to improve your reports stats which "might" be considered spammish (IMHO at least)
 - you may find out later (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5223412.msg54490277#msg54490277) that the users are already banned or old posts buried somewhere.
 - a message "see user's post history" goes a long way.
 - there are threads where OP mentions / shills his website and the thread has 2-3-4 pages and some might leave it for the discussion's sake. But hey, that's just my 2 cents :)

I'm not sure but I think some reports are handled very quickly and without any delay.
A few days ago, I visited a post offering credit card just after it was posted. I reported the post and it was deleted once I reported it.

I remember I visited two other topics offering credit card in the past few days. I visited both of them in less than 2-3 minutes after their creation and I tried to report them. I clicked on report button and I got an error saying the post does not exist. I think someone else reported them and they were handled quickly.

I like the first suggestion and it would be a useful addition.

I thought of something else. Why is it not possible to tick multiple posts in a thread and report them all for breaking the same rule?
For example, you find a thread with 3 off-topic replies. You tick all 3 and instead of opening a new tab for each report and writing 3 reports, you write only one report with links to those 3 off-topic replies.

Then use suchmoon's script as hoseinnimr93 said [HACK] One-click mod report, not for the faint of heart  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5103488.msg49475506#msg49475506)

It works as advertised: one click wonder :p

Is that how suchmoon's script works as well? I don't report that much. I think I have less than 400 reports to my name so I never tried the script. However I am not surprised that someone thought of the idea before me.

Its situational, and not always how active the moderator normally is. For example, there's currently a situation which is going on outside Bitcointalk, and I imagine a lot of the moderators are effected by that. Work has either been non existent for a lot of people during the pandemic, but personally I've seen a huge increase due to being considered a key worker. So, I think its fair to say that a few moderators will be a little less responsive, and some reports will remain unhandled for a little longer than usual.

Of course, there's then other things that can come up in ones life which can reduced their activity for an extended period of time. Unfortunately, this can't be avoided in the majority of the cases, and if its temporary then an extra moderator might not be justified. 

It is odd, because moderators can tick multiple posts, and delete them. We are operating on a older version of SMF, and although its been heavily modified its still missing a few quality to life things that you would probably expect in modern software.  

Sort of. There is no option to check multiple posts and report at once, but you can report each post with one click. It does the actual report submission in the background and throttles to 4 seconds (configurable) between reports. You just need to pre-configuure the report comment (e.g. "low value post") that gets submitted when you click the button.

This would be anice addition and would improve the reporting experience. A workaround can be made using the report comment. If you wish to report multiple replies in a thread, you could past the link to those replies when reporting one of them. AFAIK, there is no limit to the amount of characters that can be used in a report comment.

This could also be used in the case of a user's post history if you are not comfortable using external scripts. You suggest the mod go through the post history, making it easier by pointing out the specific pages you think deserve attention.

Thank you, hosseinimr93, I didn't know about this script as well. I'll try it!


Uhm...this may be what happened...but I am not sure though. I'll keep investigating it, but thanks for the tip.


Yes, I fully agree with that.

I recommend (re)hacking it to add in a few particulars that are missing from the original:

1) priority text within reports (e.g. [P1], [P2], etc. prefixes)

• I order it from 1 (malware) being maximum priority to 5 (2+ bumps/day) being minimum priority

2) page-wide report for spam

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Hopefully you won't need to use change #2 often but odds are, it probably will come to that point if you decide to take a look at 98%+ of users' profiles and 99%+ of pages from spam megathreads. I know moderators probably get sick of my reports too, which is why I inserted my priority system for better filtering.

So this actually works, inserting prefixes so mods can prioritize reports? If yes, that's great!

Just one question, since I report posts on the regular basis and would like to include that when reporting: how do you grade those reports? I guess posts with malware links are top priority, and  general spam in altcoin section very low, but how about the others? (posts with referrals, consecutive posts etc)

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Since OP suggested few changes, there is one I would like to see and might make reporting easier for those that are just starting - to remove that requirement of 300 good reports in order to get access to report history. If it's not matter of some tehnical reason why it's not available for everyone, why make such restriction?

I totally understand you lol. I think it is a great idea this prioritization.


I thought about that too, but, somehow, I forgot to add it in the OP. I also don't understand the 300 good reports "barrier".

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Additionally, I remembered also another suggestion which I forgot to mention in the OP: maybe there should be more resolutions for the reports, not just "good" and "bad". For easier understanding of the bad reports, maybe these could be classified in more types: one of them could be "duplicate". Another status could be "will not handle" - this can be used for those reports which, for one reason will never be handled.

Besides, maybe the mod's username could be added for each solved report. Thus, in case of bad reports, the reporters could ask the mod why the respective report was considered as bad. This way, the reporters would also understand why some reports are considered as being bad.

For example, I reported several shilling of some members and all the reports were good. Then I reported the exact type of posts of other members and all were marked as bad. Thus, as a reporter, I'm wondering: why was post X considered good and post Y was considered bad, if both have the same pattern?

Have you had any feedback from the moderators about this? Is this something that they find useful and pay attention to?

I am also cognizant that my reports for more serious offenses such as malware or selling illegal good/services are being buried in among lots of reports I make for straightforward spam. Given that almost all my spam reports have the exact same report comment, I figured it would be easy enough for the mods to see the more serious reports stand out, but I'd be happy to implement a priority system like that if it is useful for the mods. I have no idea which mod or mods most frequently handle my reports though.

I agree with allowing all users to access their report history.
If the purpose of that page is to help users improve their report quality, those who have started reporting posts recently and have low good reports need it more than others.

It's more of a milestone IMO. To incentivize users to reach a minimum of X good reports to receive a certain perk.
If every user here would have at least 300 good reports things would definitely look different  :P


The "duplicate" sounds fine but not that common to implement. It doesn't happens more than 0.1% of the time (100% guesstimated stats, so don't quote me on this)


Mod's username = more drama. Also last time you received a feedback you opened a thread about it so at the end it still boils down to that (discussing in a thread).
Also an additional field where mods can leave some feedback sounds nice but would be very time consuming and in some cases would be the spark that lights the flame to more drama.


Different mod, different board, different post in the thread (some OP some just regular posts), on-topic shilling (jk) :D ... there are lots of variables.
Might also wanna give reporting spam, low value, repetitive sig spam bs, bumps, malware etc a try. They tend to grow on you!


A prefix method is highly prone to abuse and pretty subjective. Things some users might feel they should have max priority: "paid for X and did not get product", "doxxin", "insulting/swearing", "defaming me and my business", etc IMHO just writing "malware" in that comment box would give it enough priority.

Given that outside of such a system, people who would want to spam could do so without a priority system, I don't see how it could screw things up unless people are going to spam harder than the global report count, which users could still do outside of such a system.

The idea of exploiting creating systems is important to evaluate but I'd argue that a prefix method adopted by multiple high-volume reporters would vastly outweigh the potential consequences of some rogue spammer flooding "priority queues". If you just think about it from a universal perspective, you increase report efficacy and make it such that moderators can funnel down issues by severity for each user, which is highly significant if they do a lot of low-priority spam reports.

One last thing - if there is no priority system by default, everything is maximum priority - rather than users maximizing priority and abusing the system through spam, this could in fact skew spam the other way. You also don't often see users banned for spamming reports, probably because that would be a terrible use of their time via the loss of either a non-Newbie account or via the creation of Brand New account spam frameworks, which still only nets you one report per account per six minutes. Pretty bad.

Maybe the report system needs to change overall for you? I think a much more better approach is to have a compilation type report page where you can use it if you are reporting several posts from one member. Similar to how the trust page work where you can insert the url of each post per line. In this way I think your time and the mods time will be save equally.

If in overall user looks spammy, I guess reporting of the profile is better deal rather than torturing of moderators. And if user has just few spammy posts, then I guess it won't take much work to follow those posts and report from threads.

That's done in order to get rid of excessive meaningless reports. In idea, they give this limit to make sure that you read those posts and report them after having some logical analyze and reasons.

They handle their job pretty well, from my own experience, reported posts are getting deleted very often.


The only other improvements that can be done in this job can be the following:
To have some reporting ranks where the number of reports and accuracy matters, for example:
Reports under 1000 - Level 0
I reported 1000 post and have 92% accuracy - I'm on level 1 (my reports are more privileged than those under level 1).
I reported 2000 post and have 92% accuracy - I'm on level 2 (my reports are more privileged than those under level 2, so at first modern sees - Level 2 > Level 1 > Leve 0 reports.
At some point, this can help moders to relief their work. The idea of this is that higher the reporter's rank, the more sure moders will be to delete those posts and don't do excessive analyze of it.

I don't think that is necessarily a good idea, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, if you tie reporting percentage to some kind of tangible outcome such as a level or rank, then people will largely look to report things that are completely objective and they know will result in a "good" report such as plagiarism or multiple posts in a row. People will be disincentivized to report more subjective things such as spam (which is what we really need more people to report), since there is a higher chance of those reports being marked "bad".

Secondly, just because I have made more reports than someone else, doesn't mean that all my reports going forward should be prioritized. A newbie member with zero previous reports is just as capable of reporting a serious offense such as linking to malware as I am, and bumping their reports to the bottom of the queue simply because they are newbie could result in them going missed for a longer period of time. If we do need some system to prioritize reports, it should be based on what the report is for, rather than who made it.

I'm also not sure we need ranks for mods to know whose reports they can generally not have to spend too much time analyzing, but I'd be happy to hear a mod's opinion on this. I would like to think that after several thousand good reports, the mods who frequently deal with my reports are able to trust that my reports are generally accurate just by seeing my username.

This sounds quite dangerous. I'd rather have mods not see the reporter's username at all LOL.

Despite having a shitload of reports at 100% accuracy (doesn't really mean much with the rounding but I digress), I've goofed up a large number of them. I certainly wouldn't want someone to get banned for plagiarism because I didn't check and mod didn't recheck the date on the original or something.

Oh, for sure. I was thinking more along the lines of reports for things being low value or off topic, which make up the vast majority of my reports. I would have thought that after thousands of good reports at 100% accuracy for this reason, a mod who frequently handles my reports would be able to simply give one of my reports for this reason a quick skim before marking it good, as opposed to a report from a completely unknown newbie, in which they might spend a few minutes looking over the thread in question to decide whether the reported post does in fact not contribute anything meaningful to the thread.

Of course I would hope (and I fully expect) that more serious reports for things like plagiarism and malware are properly double checked in every case before bans are handed out.

Instead of creating more than one report for a user, you can specify all the problems in a single report. Also, I think it is not right to report members at the slightest mistakes because I regard that the reporting system is just a warning system. Apart from that, the moderators cannot earn as much income as the moderators deserve because they work voluntarily and get a very low payment for their work and this minimal salary should not be further divided by adding unneeded mods. I used the script created by Cyrus (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5101823.0) during my 668 good reports and I bought copper membership both to report faster and support the forum. What matters is not the number of reports but the quality of the reports (phishing, plagiarism, warez etc).

Yeah I guess so, that report history is meant to be an incentive in order for people to report more, but from my personal experience, it was more of an annoyance than incentive, not to be able to see status of my reports, especially when i reported in bulk. Maybe others would report more if they have some kind of feedback right from the start.

I noticed that people asked for badges as some kind of reward for those that reports posts on regular basis. That could be much better incentive than gating useful feature that could be especially helpful to those that are just starting reporting.

I think the discussion regarding badges was determined by an old idea of theymos - Seeking reporter badge images (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4742257.0).

He was thinking to award badges for 300 / 1000 / 5000 good reports, but the idea never came alive. While this kind of incentive would be appreciated by a lot of members, I think many others just want to keep the forum clean.

So when reports are made, does it only go to the specific moderator of that board?

If so, then the Beginners & Help moderator would have a backlog of possible post reports since MiningBuddy has not been active for a while.

Also, is there anyway to see my report history, not just the accuracy statistics?

There are a number of different types of mods which may or may not be able to handle a report depending on which board the report was made in and the rank of the user being reported. Local moderators and board specific moderators can only handle reports in their given boards. Patrollers can handle reports on posts made by newbies across the entire forum. Global mods and admins can handle all reports in all boards, as well as having some additional powers such as being able to issue bans. If you make a report, it will be visible to all the moderates who are able to handle it.

You only need to make some reports on Beginners and Help to confirm that they do indeed get handled. They will be handled by either a global moderator, or in the case of a newbie post, a patroller. MiningBuddy isn't actually a moderator at all anymore, his name just hasn't been removed from the page.

Make 300 good reports, and then go here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=reportlist;mine

300 reports, would be a while but thank you for the information. Saving the link for future reference.


p.s.

https://i.gyazo.com/e4ca429b65881d4358c1dd521e394e04.png
i just can't help and try. .  ;D

o_e_l_e_o
The main idea behind my proposal is that having some ranks and badges for reporters will reward people to report more spammy posts. We have ranks where you need for example 1000 activity + merit to get Legendary member. Merit requirement gives people a stimulus to write less spammy posts. If we implement something similar on reports, for example: 500 report - 95% accuracy <-- Level 1, 2000 report - 96% accuracy <-- Level 2 reporter and so on and this will be shown under profile, I guess it will probably stimulate people to report more posts. Won't be bad if we even implement it for rank up.

If we make reports/badges public like Trust, people may look up into profiles and check whether users really report spammy posts or not. If most of their reported posts are just personal revenge, such users should be banned.

And the reason why I stated some reporting ranks is that some users here really do deep investigation and report after that (logically their rank should be high).

Also I acknowledge that Moders are facing this problem but somehow there is no response from them. They know what they need, so it's up to their choice.

Yeah, I don't disagree with that at all. I think the "Reporter Badges" that theymos previously talked about (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4742257.0) are a good idea, because they will encourage more people to report.

I don't think it's a good idea to tie it to ranking up, however. If you did tie it to ranking up but without paying attention to the accuracy, then people who don't care about reporting could just report hundreds of posts without paying attention to whether the reports were right or wrong to reach the necessary target. If you did also set a "required accuracy", then as I said above it will discourage people from reporting anything but the most heinous of rule breaking because they don't want to make it more difficult for themselves to rank up. Both of these scenarios are a negative outcome for the system.

So while I agree with reporter badgers, I think it should be entirely separate from rank, and not bring any special benefits, except maybe removing the blasted 4 second cooldown between reports.