Hello everyone,
As many of you have noted over the years, our forum has needed a better system for reporting posts that violate our Community Guidelines. When you are signed in, as of the first week of December (available now), you'll find that there is a "Report" link alongside every post. Clicking this will allow you to submit a report to us. You will no longer need to indicate who the violator is, what web page the violation is on, or which post is in violation. We will now get this information automatically. This should make it much easier and faster for you to let us know when guideline violations occur. This may even allow us to clean things faster. We'll see how that goes.
OK, now for some ground rules! While we can handle and help shape how people use this new feature on a one-on-one basis with new users, we probably can't do that with all of you at once... at least not effectively. So, please kindly read the following...
When you submit a report, you will be prompted for a short explanation for why you find the post to be a violation of our Community Guidelines. The short character count is intentionally limiting so that we can get right at the heart of the issue. We are looking for simple reports like "This is spam", "This looks like promotion", "I find X offensive", "I feel attacked by X". X stands for the specific words in the post you find troublesome. If we need more information, we will send you a PM or email.
We will review every report. You may not receive word regarding the actions taken in response to your report. Actions taken in moderation of others’ violations are private. Please know that the new Report feature is not a black hole. Please trust that we take appropriate action behind the scenes even when what is visible to you may not match your expectations. We will do our best to address issues in a timely manner as we do now.
Please only submit one report per violation. Reporting something more than once will only slow down the process, not speed it up or cause automatic removal of the post in question.
Please only submit one report per blatant spammer.
If there are many posts in a thread that are in violation because of an open argument, please do not report every post. That would be a lot for us to wade through and will slow down the cleanup process. Please just report the initiating violation and indicate in your report that more violations follow. You may give a second report if there is one other post in particular that really needs to be looked at.
As always, if you simply do not like a post because it doesn’t answer the question or it wasn’t militantly positive, this is not grounds for moderation. We are all adults and we need to be able to look beyond perceived slights when it is possible that something was not intended to be negative or when information could be helpful to others if it isn’t for you. Follow the golden rule of forum behavior (if you don’t like a post, move on to the next one). That being said, we do not support snark, etc and we do our best to eliminate genuine negativity when reported.
We will always prefer that you report an issue instead of responding publicly to it.
Since this new feature is more efficient for you, we expect the volume of reports to increase. We may not have the time to thank you personally. We will do our best to check in with you as we can. Thanks for continuing to help keep our community clean. We couldn’t do it without you.