[RFC] Report System Improvements

[Sam]

What to change
Reports are used to alert Moderators of rule breaking, however their usefulness is fairly limited. The following are proposed improvements to the system as a whole.

• Allow the user ID of the reporter and reportee to be associated with the report itself. Any Moderator should be able to easily view a list of the reports given by a user and reports against a specific users' post.
• Allow all reports to be viewed after being closed. Now, you can't take the original MCP link and expect to view the report, it gives you a useless "This report has already been closed" message. To find an original report (in 3.0) that has been closed, one must dig around in the MCP.
• Have some sort of status on the report, i.e. "New", "In progress", "Waiting further input", "Invalid", and "Closed".
• Have outstanding reports a user has reported appear on a UCP page if they check the box "Notify me when this report has been handled."
• Allow moderators and the original reporter to leave comments on the reports (where Moderators have the ability to assign visibility for the post to either "Moderators" or "Moderators and Reporter"). This allows a Moderator to close an invalid report and explain why it was invalid, or keep a record on what further action was done in the incident for future moderation issues.
• Create a "Report Type" flag in the table to define each type, such as Posts, Users (profiles), PMs, and even custom, plugin defined types.

Why this will benefit the software
Moderators are an essential part to every single community - with public discourse comes that need. Reports greatly assist moderators do their job as it is now, however the improvements mentioned above will help lead to better communication between moderators, a more useful MCP, greater consistency among the team, and improved contact with their community. Additionally, it will create more flexibility with the system and allow for things such as Titania reports to be handled with a plugin on the existing system instead of creating it's own.

[Meis2M]

very good idea i like it.

[imkingdavid]

I agree with most of the items you suggested.

One thing I would like to add to this is the ability to assign a report to a specific moderator or group with moderator permissions, similar to a ticket system. Some boards have a high volume of reports so being able to delegate the work between moderators could save time.

Allow the user ID of the reporter and reportee to be associated with the report itself. Any Moderator should be able to easily view a list of the reports given by a user and reports against a specific users' post.

Agreed.

Allow moderators and the original reporter to leave comments on the reports (where Moderators have the ability to assign visibility for the post to either "Moderators" or "Moderators and Reporter"). This allows a Moderator to close an invalid report and explain why it was invalid, or keep a record on what further action was done in the incident for future moderation issues.

I agree big time with the discussion area for the reports. A forum I was once staff on had a system like this (which wouldn't be a bad thing for 4.0 either), and in the discussion topics, you had to have a 3 moderator consensus before any action was taken on most rule violations (besides spam account banning and other small infractions). Also, all actions had to be logged by the moderator by posting in the topic, as well as the text of any PMs sent back/forth between the offender and moderator. Being able to have that discussion area greatly increased accountability and allowed moderators to work reports without stepping on each others' toes. Also, it gave more information about the violation, what was done about it, and what should be done for future violations.

Create a "Report Type" flag in the table to define each type, such as Posts, Users (profiles), PMs, and even custom, plugin defined types.

Also a good idea. Some moderators could focus mostly on profile or PM violations while others do so on posts and topics. Going further than that, though, on report type, I would suggest even having types such as "Swearing", "Off topic posting", "Inappropriate content in post", etc. so that you can easily keep track of how many times a user violates the same rule.