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OK, I'm really annoyed. I reported a post on "Urban Planning" last night for a huge copyright violation. I'm talking nine paragraphs plus an introduction and conclusion. This morning, I reported it again. It's still there at 12:41 PM MST. This is not some "gray area" TOS violation, it's a big kahuna. I don't think I should have to DM some mod; I think the report button should do the trick. This is not my first experience with this issue, either, on multiple forums.
Thank you for making a report. The mod team sincerely appreciates the help of members who help keep the community operating within the rules that make it an enjoyable place to visit. If it's any consolation, the longer a report sits untouched, the bigger the mess a moderator has to clean up as the reported post draws replies, so I doubt that a moderator would ignore a report like that on purpose. Since we're not allowed to discuss specific issues in this forum and I don't have much experience with the day-to-day happenings in that particular forum, let me share a little more general perspective from my own experience that might be helpful.
Urban Planning has one assigned moderator. AFAIK, that forum's not a hotbed of controversy and ill will, so your report(s) might be the only issue that moderator has to deal with there this week. That's not an excuse, but that past experience does account for how often the assigned moderator would expect to find problems there and feel the need to make a point to visit. I have moderated forums that need action on fewer than one post per month! I don't worry much if I miss a day checking a forum like that.
For a few of my forums, I'm the only assigned moderator. Moderating is a volunteer gig. I don't imagine there's a moderator on the team that doesn't have commitments of some kind offline, be they family commitments or work commitments. Some days I have the opportunity to get to my forums several times a day. Some days, it's tough to fit in one visit. Because it's a volunteer gig, moderating's never more important than what I have going on offline.
I understand the above. However, I thought reported posts were available to all mods. Shouldn't somene investigate a copyright violation?
If we have time/opportunity to open those reports.
Let me explain more. Reported posts create threads in a special forum. The titles of those threads include 3 things: the title of the thread, the screen name of the member whose post was reported and the screen name of the reporter. To see more than that, we need to open the report thread.
With only that information, either the name of the member who made the bad post or the title of the thread need to stand out for me to take the time to open reports in a forum I'm not assigned to. From what I know and have seen, we generally pounce on spam or trolling in other forums because either the thread titles or member name make it clear that a post is one or the other of those.
You might be surprised how many trolls create accounts with screen names like "ima jerk" or "U R all idiots" and how many spammers make threads with titles that are unmistakably spam. By comparison, the thread you reported looks quite routine in the list. Although copyright violations are important and mods are encouraged to address copyright violations in other mods' forums, the reports of that get less urgent attention since they just don't stand out from other reported posts as much.
Last edited by Bo; 01-06-2011 at 07:13 PM..
Reason: Changed two words to fix a clumsily-worded sentence in paragraph 3.
Thanks, Bo, for the concise explaining you've done in this thread; it's very helpful for the understanding of how things work behind the scenes. May I suggest that this thread gets incorporated into a sticky for awhile?
Awww, thanks. I decided over the holidays that a change was in order and that it would be fun to be the very first member of City-Data with a 2-letter screen name. An added bonus is that it saves me some keystrokes when I sign DMs.
I kept it similar to the old name to make it easier for everyone else to remember.
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