Reporting Rulebreakers: Derpibooru vs. e621

Disclaimer: This post is not intended to demand anything or be expecting of changes. Just food for thought I’ll bring up.

Using the report function to bring rulebreakers to the attention of mods and admins! It’s a great function and it serves a vital purpose. I’ve used the report function quite a few times over the course of the many many years. However, I wanted to share the experience I have as a user of the report button on Derpibooru as compared to another somewhat similar site, e621.

On e621, when a report is viewed and considered by a mod, the reporting user is immediately sent a DM. Usually this is to the effect of “Thanks for reporting, we handled it.” Occasionally the response will be “Thanks, but this doesn’t break rules, so no action taken”, and very rarely there might be direct followup.

On Derpibooru, though, this doesn’t happen. You can open your list of reports as a user to see which ones are still open, and which ones have been closed. When a report is closed, you receive no communication as the reporting user, aside from the rare case where the mod needs extra information from you. Now, just speaking personally, this more often than not just leaves me asking “Did the mods do anything? Was my report valid and action was taken? Or, was my report invalid and nothing was done?”

By receiving that instant communication via the DM, I immediately know whether I was in the right or the wrong to use the report in this case. So, if I see something similar happening I’ll report it again. Otherwise, if it was invalid, I will no longer report anything similar as I know it was a misunderstanding on my part. It also gives a timeframe to know the point that the mods dealt with a user, which can be referenced if the same user continues to misbehave in the same way. With the way this site handles it, I don’t know if my report against User A resulted in anything happening. For the sake of argument let’s say the report was invalid and no action was taken against user A. Since I receive no communication besides “ticket closed”, I might see user A doing the same thing again and make another invalid report.

This has actually led to confusion on my part before that I had to post on the forums to get answered. It’s also left me wondering why the comment that suggests a bunch of real people should die was left up without being taken down.

Don’t get me wrong, the system on Derpibooru isn’t broken. It’s perfectly functional the way it is, but I think it could be a lot better. I feel much more comfortable and confidant reporting misbehaviour on e621 than I do on here, because on here I have to ask “Was anything done?” at least 75% of the time. It wouldn’t have to be a personally-typed message every single time; if it’s possible to automate it somehow that would still be fine. Or, alternatively, change the backend somehow so that instead of just showing “Closed” it could say either “Handled” or “No action taken”.

On e6, do you have any data (or even a gut feeling) about how often a report being closed as “no action taken” causes further moderation headaches? I suspect (but can’t confirm) that’s the case here.

Sometimes, I’ll get a DM here if the report I filed is more complex than just obvious spam or an off-topic image.

@🐴
Let’s see … I sent 10 PMs today. And closed 31 ‘things’ that were system generated, closed 12 reports … and updated 5 reports without closing them, and banned 12 people.

Oooh … yeah. Ok, looking at that I just realized something that might make a big difference between here and other sites.

I am not sending PMs to the reporters. Because the reporters aren’t the ones I need to talk to.

I mean, if the result was the person was banned, then they’re banned. The ban message is the message. But, for almost all of them I send a PM because most of the reports I work on aren’t “just do this”. They’re “Well, there’s options, which do you prefer” or “Welcome to the site, here’s why what you did caused problems” or “I looked into it and here’s what I found” kinds of things.

Yeah, I did not send a single PM to any one who reported something. But I sent 10 PMs to people who needed to know how to avoid being reported again, and helping people with questions.

… hmmm … man, if I had to write a PM to everyone whose report I worked on today I have to admit I would not have taken some of those reports. There’s some really angry people on the site right now and I’d rather not have to have a personal conversation with some of them.

Also, I don’t know how other sites handle it, but we get things like 6 people reporting one problem, and when anyone ‘works’ that problem, all of the reports get closed. So even finding “who reported it” can be a little bit of a challenge with the moderation tools. So - just finding “who to write to” with some of the things I did today would mean crawling through the first three pages of reports to find the reports that were automagically closed as a result of “thing”. Assuming the report was actually a report of “the thing” and not something more general like “I think there’s a problem with” where the “thing” isn’t even visible without getting into the report.

But, for me? I really don’t want to have a personal discussion with some of the people who report things here.

A very not small number of the things we are currently dealing with right now are just people angrily reporting other people because they disagree about a ship, Twilight Sparkle’s wings, or whether this or that episode was the complete and total end of the fandom.

If someone needs help, I try to help. But if they’re just reporting a thing, if the thing is actionable and the rest of staff agree, I do the thing. Thing done.

Maybe if the site could figure out “what happened - if anything”, that might help. But many of the reports I worked on today don’t have any kind of thing that could be automatically detected. Like, looking into tagging someone is doing, or talking to someone about their uploads. There’s nothing for the site to “see” that it could autorespond with.

Hmmm … just thought of another gotcha. If I do see there’s 10 reports for 1 problem, I close all the reports except for the best one. All of those people would get a “Nothing was done” when in fact the report is still being worked. Now I’m really wondering how other sites are able to do what you’re describing. It might be that how they work reports is just so different that there’s no corollary or comparable autogenerated outcome that we could match.

@Ciaran
Seems that mod tools here have a broken ticketing queue.

Is there ever not a bunch of really angry people on this site or periods with a lull in nonsense reports?

@🐴
Mostly the rage seems to come just after school lets out in the spring, and after it starts again in the fall. A month or two later, and things are usually a lot less like a grade school playground.

And, I’m not sure it’s broken. It seems to work fine, and does a good job of doing exactly what it’s created to do. The other stuff we have to figure out how to do ourselves by hand or with other tools, or wait for the wonderful volunteers both on the dev team and people working on the Philomena project who are extending and growing the functionality of the site.

Anyway, what I have seen some people do is ask in the report if whomever works on it can please send a PM when it’s done, and letting us know what they’re curious about. Of course, that only works if the report isn’t automatically closed because whatever it is reporting is deleted because of a different report. And it may meant the report may take a while longer, waiting for someone who has time to discuss whatever the report was about.