60 second delay between reporting posts

Eliot Rosewater

I'm sorry if this issue has already been brought up but I did a number of searches on the Feedback forum and I don't think it has. I know this post is long, but I really have tried to make it as brief as possible. And finally, I hope I'm not being petty and/or pedantic.

tl;wr: I got hit with the "Please wait another..." message a few times today when reporting some troublesome posts (all of which were acted on). It would seem to me that the disadvantages of the delay being so long (a full minute) outweigh it's benefits.


I think these are some disadvantages of the delay:

• Troublesome posts tend to appear more than one at a time, in clusters or groups, and it's hard to report all of these because you have to wait for the delay to elapse.
  Examples:
  • Generally if a thread is a "stupid" thread, or an attempt at trolling, it will be subject to a lot of posts which warrant reporting, as people post outrageous comments in reply.
  • A troublesome poster will often post more than once and thus there will be more than one post of his to report.
  • Troublesome posts beget troublesome posts. If someone says "Fine Gael are ****" someone else will probably say "Fianna Fail are ****" in return. Multiple posts to report again.
• I generally don't post in threads where there's abuse going on. I'll skim it, report any troublesome posts I see, and leave. Once I come up against a 60 second delay I just "x" out, and won't report anymore. A lot of people are probably like this.
• Sometimes I report a post before realizing I forgot to include some detail, such as some aspect of the user's history which pertains to the post. I can't add this in without waiting 60 seconds, which I probably won't do.

Of course the main counter argument to a lot of the above is that the moderators will read the whole thread when they see an abusive post therein, and this eliminates the need to report multiple posts in the same thread. I don't know if this is the case.


There are some advantages to the delay (combats spam and silly reporting) but I'm unsure if these warrant the delay being so long.


I thought I'd just throw it out there.

nesf

It's there to prevent abuses of the system. Consider that each press of the button sends an email to every mod connected with the forum.

sceptre

There's also a vbulletin flood post limitation as each report creates a reported post thread and if I remember rightly the delay for new posts is 60 seconds for anti-spam etc reasons.

I know you report politics posts as other regular contributors do and they're always appreciated, especially given that I can't remember the last time you reported a post which didn't need to have some action taken and the reports definitely helped there - you're one of the people that "gets" the posts that have a need to be reported. We certainly tend to check the posts in a thread where there have been reports, especially around the reported post. I think it's a limitation we're stuck with as some bozo would proceed to abuse it. I agree wholeheartedly with everything you've bullet pointed though.

Eliot Rosewater

I didn't know that reporting a post sent off an email and created a thread; I'd imagined that there was some "Reported Posts" tab in moderator utilities where you went in to check. As such I completely underestimated how annoying spam through the post reporting featuring is, and I think it does tip the scale firmly in favor of keeping the delay.

Thanks for the replies lads.