One of the ways users can contribute to the community and help make mods’ work easier is to flag posts that are in the wrong forum, spam, empty/deleted, etc.
But on this site–unique among all the communities I’ve participated in online since 1997–if I flag a piece of spam I have to wait 60 seconds before I flag another post. And in fact if I flag a second post before that 60 seconds has elapsed, I get a 5-min timeout (that may be off–I don’t remember exactly).
This seems counterproductive if not actively hostile to well-meaning users.
Mods: This should be changed. And if it won’t be, why not? It’s a no brainer.
@marvin100, thanks for your feedback and willingness to help. The setting is such in order to prevent the massive spam volume we’ve been dealing with in past months. Unfortunately, this affects everyone.
@marvin100, unfortunately, reported posts are counted as regular posts (so the system does not differentiate between them, thus the same limits apply).
@marvin100, sometimes it’s a good thing that users are blocked from reporting often. Some people don’t understand that they need to report a person only one time, even if there are lots of problem posts. The blocking feature prevents us from getting a bunch of unnecessary reports.
@MaineLonghorn – that would be trivially easy to distinguish on the back end: limit flags of one user to one per (unit of time) without limiting flags of different posters.
(Although it does beg the question of what the holdup is–surely the site is profitable enough to have a developer or two available? I mean, if lil’ old Metafilter can employ mods–with benefits!–and a dev, surely CC can step up and invest in its own site, right?)
Yeah, I’ll heartily agree with this. On another forum I mod on, we’ll get korean spam and my inbox will flood with people reporting each one, over and over and over again. It’s a small website, so I can’t imagine the volume of reports that would happen here-it would be unworkable.
Dont always pay attention to who the author is of the asian spam. So sometimes I report more than one (sorry- just trying to be helpful- but then get timed out. Agree it’s annoying). And, when I recently reported only one, maybe 2 one of a spammers posts, the others remained up. Just sayin’.
