Wedge

Well personally I would disable it, because if many people don't like someone and they are planning to just all press on the report link, they would get him on moderation without he/she did something. :P

Yeah, I had thought of that, didn't really have a good way to deal with it - but there's nothing to prevent that right now from causing moderators trouble as it is.

Perhaps something like enabling by default it when the poster of the message has less than 10/20/30 posts?

I've seen this kind of setup before. It got abused.

@Norodo, sure, I can well imagine. I just wondered if there was any mileage at all in the idea, because I'm sure we can work on limiting abuse.

@Dr Deejay - that might work but I have a further idea.

Suppose once a post had been reported, and subsequently moderated/reapproved, it got a 'protected' flag to protect it from being reported again, and editing would naturally clear that flag.

That way, you can only suppress a post once, though there's nothing to stop you reporting every post made by a member - just as there isn't now. The only difference is that if you do, you're just going to annoy the moderators who may respond by limiting your ability to report posts anyway...

It's not a bad idea. Worth a shot, I suppose.

Sounds more like plugin material though if we're going to do that, at least then we can fold it into core rather than having something of a useless feature in core that has to be removed later ;)

You could limit abuse by only allowing (configurable maybe) X amount of reports per x amount of time per user. Maybe make it configurable to the point some groups may have a limit and others not,

Say I could only report 5 posts per day, I am more likely to report real issues then harass a user and by extension moderators.

I like teh idea as I've had that issue... actually I think we even spoke about this some time back. My moderators do get annoyed as do I when a post we've deemed acceptable keeps getting reported over and over. I'm not sure where the throttle should be set but I do like the idea.This I like.

That makes me wonder if the protected flag should be implemented generally or not, actually, regardless of whether it's used to prevent reports escalating like this or not.

I dont see why not, in most cases moderators would be more than capable of deciding whether a reported post is acceptable or not so once they ok the post I don't see a reason it should be re-reported if it hasnt been edited. There is the chance the moderator could have made the wrong decision to ok/approve the post but that should be minimal.

As far as escalating, maybe if said post is reported x times after being approved by a moderator its flagged for the admin to take a look... but I'd be happy with just having it protected until edited.

To think... Of all the time we could all save when developing Wedge, if there was no such thing as a spam bot or a forum troll... *sob*

Oh hell yes. But whatever is built, it will be abused.