I believe there could be two types of improvements to help keep things under control.
The first is to categorize reports. I do not know why they have not thought of this yet or why it has not implemented yet... when someone makes a report, they could choose from a predefined list the reason for doing so: spam, off topic, plagiarism, fraud, use of AI or othes... and obviously below a free field to person justify the report or add more details to the moderators.
Why is this important? First, because I think some types of reports are more urgent than others (plagiarism vs. off-topic, for example: ), and then moderators can act first, prioritizing what is most important.
Second, because would be possible to have more statistics about the "problems" of user behavior and take proactive or "educational" measures to try understand it and reduce these behavioral problems.
And the other improvement would be to have an auto assessment of plagiarism in each post.
I know this is critical, but perhaps it would be interesting if each post had an indicator (percentage) of how suspicious that post is.
Obviously, this should not be a criterion for reporting, but it could be a premise for conducting a more detailed investigation and even discourage people who still insist on using AI to blatantly generate content.
I like this idea 💡, although all reports should be treated with importance. Even if prioritized through criteria, all reports should be effectively reviewed and given due process within a reasonable amount of time. Reports viewed as “not as important” should not go unprocessed or delayed. I’d say reports should be categorized, but I’d suggest reports should be put into a queue, tagged by categorization, on a first-come, first-served basis.
The other idea I like as well. I back it.
overwhelmed moderators.
I'm certainly not overwhelmed. In fact, I probably could do with more reports coming my way. Finding posts to take action on is a little different as I'm only one pair of eyes, but I'd estimate over 80% of actions I take are from posts I find rather than them being reported. Certainly, over 50%.
Lets take a look at some of the past months:
Period Jan 04 - Feb 03. In this period, 1457 reports handled as good, 65 handled as bad, 145 unhandled.
Period Dec 05 - Jan 04. In this period, 1870 reports handled as good, 65 handled as bad, 106 unhandled
Period Nov 05 - Dec 05. In this period, 1268 reports handled as good, 77 handled as bad, 83 unhandled.
The vast majority of reports are handled every month/period. In those 3 periods, we have over 90% handled consistently. Unhandled below 10% consistently. Also, do remember that unhandled reports don't mean they haven't been seen or reviewed. Leaving reports unhandled is a perfectly valid option at times. I would estimate (without any evidence of course) that more than 80% of those unhandled reports were seen and reviewed by someone. It could also be based on the time theymos retrieved those stats, it might be that the time theymos retrieves those stats, is a particular hotspot for unhandled reports. Also, some might be in local sections which don't have a dedicated moderator, and therefore no or very little knowledge of the languages between the mods. So, we have to take all those things into consideration.
Personally, I don't think that looks like the mods being overwhelmed. I think we have a little more than 20 moderators including theymos. Lets just say 20 to be safe though. If we take the total of those three periods: 5136 reports and divide that by the amount of mods, thats a little more than 250~ reports across three periods for each moderator. That's a little more than 100 if we take the busiest period of those three for each moderator. That's like a couple reports per moderator each day right?
The height of ICOS and airdrops you might consider it a heavy workload, and a lot got missed then due to sheer amount, but that was when the forum was at its highest activity level. Well before the influx of AI issues, but I don't think the current moderators are overworked per say. Its more like, there's not enough eyes, this was supplemented by a highly active community reporting things, but that has declined over the years, which I would like to see some sort of positive encouragement towards getting more users to report like the report badges or something.
Just for transparency I've handled 2 reports in the last hour (which includes making this post also) and taken 13 actions myself. So, absolutely reports don't make up our entire workload, but that's the only statistics we have to base on when considering whether we are overworked or not.
I appreciate your response to this important issue. It’s great to get feedback like this. I am all for transparency. More eyes on the situation is something I advocate for. I would like to see the community being proactive, considering improvements, ideas, solutions, and at the very least having some dialogue on matters that could use a little attention. Some things can get so outdated that they just don’t make sense anymore. The forum, I think, is experiencing this. We should care to improve. Honestly, just maintaining something always leads to its eventual demise.