Topic: Monthly Report Statistics - page 5. (Read 4324 times)

They can pull there guns , we are always ready to fight them and there is nothing to fear.
With or without a reporter badged let them come and if they think they are treated wrong they can complain to the Moderators.
If they are spamming , shitposters or anything that should be reported just report it , the community will be on your side.

Your reply is true but personally, I think Sarah Azhari implied about negative attitude towards forum members with reporter badges in general.

Spammers, shit posters might not know who report their posts but when they lose their minds, they might pull their gun towards reporter-badged members. It is vague fear from Sarah but it is understandable. Hate reporters or not, they don't have many things to do against reporters.

I'm only going to speak for myself, but if you report an old post in the Fr section, I will probably handle it. If you report 10-20-100 old posts in important/interesting topics, I will probably handle them so that these topics are rid of parasite posts. But if you report 10-20-100 old posts in topics that have fallen into the abyss, I will send you a PM to ask you to stop, it's useless, nobody is going to read or reread these topics. And I'd feel like I am stealing Theymos

You seem to keep forgetting that someone actually has to manually handle those reports, they are not automatically deleted. So its not only about those few who report old posts.

With that being said, maybe forum staff concluded that moderators energy should be more focused at reports that affect members (and therefore forum) more, which are of those recently written posts instead spending a lot of their time going through thousands of reports each month that affect forum members very little, if anything.  


Hence small incentive like report badge or something along those lines. Don't get me wrong, I personally don't care about the badges at all but I am pretty certain that would make people report way more so why not. Only problem is that chances of that happening are slim to none but who knows, stranger things have happened.

Slippery slope.


Forum won't become a worse place by deleting 3 years old posts, but I don't think it will become noticeably better either. At least not enough that its worth it to deal with those. After all, I don't think that only important metric is number of deleted posts, but also where and when those posts are written as well, but unfortunately that's info that we don't have access to.

In my opinion, 1 report of a post written today by a signature campaign shitposter is worth more than 100 reports of old bumps and similar shitposts written 3 years ago by some low rank shitposter or paid thread bumper. And that's why I like this new change, because those who like to report can actually focus their energy on something that affects this forum much more.


Introducing badges would make people report more recently produced garbage (that's simply how things work as people like these kind of things) which in the end would make this forum much better place than removing posts written years ago. Keep in mind that you are still free to report old posts and they will get deleted unless you report it for one of the trivial reasons.

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Reports are anonymous, no one except forum staff knows who reported which post.

The reported post decreased for each month, Maybe the reporter have a busy, or maybe the psychological condition is the same as the Bitcoin price


Is the member who has a reporter badge will be accused and will be hated?

because who knows, the member whose post was deleted, getting not paid because of not enough weekly post quota, and they accused members who have reporter badges.

And, I don't know why Administrator didn't update the statistic or top reporter  again. it's been 2 years I can't see the update, maybe a post like that will make the reporter excited again to continue again his activity. (Because of human nature),  there is a sense of pride if their name exists on the list.

Thats for sure not much reports for one month and a little bit scary of that numbers and what we got the month before and all.
Maybe its also because that the spring and nearly summertime has started in a lot of countries and people dont spend that much time on the Forum.
I can say that i daily making some reports and whenever i see something i hit the report to moderator button.

Yep, there's not a whole lot of incentive for most people to spend their time doing it. It's also one of those things that feels like "someone else" will pick up the slack, so it's not a big deal if you don't participate.

I recently tried to dedicate more of my time to reporting, and I had my first experience with one of my reports being marked as "bad". That's cool, an opportunity to learn I guess (I like LoyceV's perspective on "bad" reports). But I was just getting started (only 197 reports) so I didn't have access to the view that would allow me to see which one it was. All I could do from my end was go through my local record of reports (I keep a text file) and then follow up on each of them (i.e. see which ones were handled and which ones weren't), to try to determine which one was "bad".

I picked a small handful that I thought would be likely candidates, and I was pretty disappointed by what I found. For example, one of the reports was to do with a string of 6 posts, and the mod that handled it only merged the last two posts for some reason (by no logic that I could ascertain, each of them was short and only separated by a few minutes). Another was someone that posted the same thing twice in a row, except that the second post included an additional question, and the mod deleted the longer of the two posts.

Maybe I'm super unlucky, but finding two cases like that after only checking ~10 of my reports doesn't exactly inspire confidence, you know? (That the mods are performing their duties with due care, that is.)

Now that I'm aware that there's a non-negligible chance that my future reports will be quickly skimmed and then mishandled, I'm struggling to find the motivation to keep doing it...

I don't think I'll pick it up again (I can't abide by sloppy moderation), but on a brighter note, if there's ever a consensus on how to motivate people to get into reporting (i.e. reporter badges, or something similar), then I'll happily donate the dev time required to implement it (I think reporter badges based on some variant of the "rMerit/rPoints" idea will end up working out quite nicely; some of my thoughts on that are here, and here).

theymos can deploy the badge anytime he wants. Problem is theymos does not want to do that. I recall that theymos wrote he does not want to deploy to many badges and make user profiles like rainbows.


Meanwhile, we have [Userscript] Unofficial Bitcointalk Reporter Badges

Imho, that latest innovation actually makes sense because what's even point of reporting several years old post (unless its malware of course)? I might be wrong here, but seems to me that it was mainly used for the sort of stat padding and nothing else.


+1, that makes more sense than allowing reports of the old posts just for the sake of increasing post report number.

People are just reporting less and less. There's nothing in it for most people and it's time consuming and a never ending amount of stuff to report so most people just don't bother or quickly grow tired of it. That's why I think theymos should implement something like  reporting badges with some small perks so there's at least some incentive.

Period Apr 20 - May 20. In this period, 2025 reports handled as good, 121 handled as bad, 150 unhandled.

Period Mar 21 - Apr 20. In this period, 8685 reports handled as good, 202 handled as bad, 143 unhandled.

Period Feb 19 - Mar 21. In this period, 16589 reports handled as good, 321 handled as bad, 167 unhandled.

Period Dec 21 - Jan 20. In this period, 3265 reports handled as good, 216 handled as bad, 121 unhandled.
Period Jan 20 - Feb 19. In this period, 9232 reports handled as good, 356 handled as bad, 170 unhandled.

Campaign managers hiring based on number of reports? I'm not sure they'd be that interested in that. Since, all they ultimately care about is the amount of posts, and the quality of posts. While, it'd be great for them to be a little more strict in certain areas when it comes to accepting users on their campaigns, I'm not sure encouraging them to count other things other than number of posts, and quality to be within their interests, and the communities.

I just wish the lower quality campaigns would step up their game a little. I don't need them to completely change, and I don't think reporting should have any effect on their campaigns.

Yep, I agree. That was bad wording on my part. I should have said unhelpful strategies.

Glad if they were worth reading


Without having the technical skills you have, from what I just read, I understand that at code level the work is not so much as I (and others?) thought it could be. This is good news! Regarding the idea to test this change on SMF, in order to see if it's worth implementing it on the new forum software -- again, it makes sense. And I also think that rPoints sound better than rMerits, as this name would make less confusion than "rMerits".

It seems you have all settled Now we need to see theymos' oppinion...

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I'd make a mention here: as a dedicated reporter which I am, from my own point of view, I can say that there are not any low-effort strategies. I understand that a report breaking the rule related to plagiarism may be considered as way more valuable than a report for multiple posts in a row. However, if a reporter is skilled on plagiarism issues and he manages to get a few cases per month (per year?) should not be seen as God-a-like compared with a reporter which did not find any plagiarism issues but, instead, made 5000 reports of zero-value posts or of double bumping or of multiple posts in a row. The reports made by the lattest may have a lower value (taken one by one) compared with finding a case of plagiarism; yet, in order to make 5000 (good) reports of zero-value posts, this reporter would spend dozen of hours.

So we have a first reporter, which works a few hours the entire year and reports a few (good) cases of plagiarism -- all good, bravo to him! But the second one, although he made reports with lower value, worked much, much harder than the first. Does this make any sense?

Maybe reporting 50-100 zero-value posts is easy. But if someone reports 10.000 - 15.000 - 20.000 such posts, just imagine how much time it takes to do it (first of all, finding them; second of all, analyzing them into the context of the topic; then reporting them; writing a comment for each report etc.). I, for one, know how much time it takes. In some days I reported 800 posts. But, for doing that, I needed 12 hours or so, in a context when I already had prepared all those posts and I just had to hit "Report" button. If we count also the time needed for finding them and analyzing them -- you do the math

To add to PowerGlove's proposal, maybe after implementing his idea and seeing the results, we could also encourage campaign managers to pay a little more attention to the members with these badges? Not making it a requirement to join though.
Also it's a good idea if mods could decide who gets the rpoints to avoid farming. Thanks PowerGlove for your contribution. +5 merits. (have zero to send).

Yup, I get what you're saying, and I appreciate your points.

I would answer them one-by-one, but I'm not that invested in this idea (other than believing that it's a technically sound countermeasure for theymos' concerns). So, I'll address your main points (as I see them):

I don't believe that the administrative effort would be that significant. With the existing merit system, theymos seems to have taken a very hands-off approach, and it's working out pretty well, in my opinion. With the rMerit system, theymos might have to be a little more prescriptive, and write some rough guidelines for the mods to follow, but this would be (mostly) a once-off effort.

I don't believe this would be that complicated to implement. I can appreciate how my complexity estimate would seem to have little value, but I did recently finish a 2FA patch for the forum, and I can tell you without hesitation that a basic implementation of reporter badges based on rMerit would be easy by comparison.

I get what you're saying about duplicated work and Epochtalk making it difficult to justify effort being spent on SMF, but on the other hand, I think there's an opportunity to test and refine this idea on SMF before deciding whether it's worth adding to Epochtalk.

One last thought, which I didn't make clear in my original proposal: I'm not suggesting making "rMerit" a thing that shows up on your profile page, or above your avatar. It's not meant to be on an equal footing with proper merit, it's just an implementation detail. The only people that should be worried about how it works, what it means, and where it's displayed are the people who are shooting for reporter badges. If it were implemented tomorrow, most people wouldn't even notice (there are almost no user-facing changes, besides the badges themselves). The way I see it working (at least, initially) is that when you go to report a post, you might see something like this:



Seeing [rMerit: ...] would be enough of a clue for interested people to search the forum for "rMerit" and find the topic(s) describing rMerit ranks/badges and how much rMerit can be expected (typically) for different kinds of reports. Actually, as I'm explaining this, I'm realizing that calling it "rMerit" was probably a mistake and something like "rPoints" might sit better with people and lead to less confusion. Anyway, my point is that this doesn't have to be a "big" oh-my-god-this-changes-everything feature; it can be implemented in a very low-key way that only really affects the mods (and, of course, slowly affects the histogram of moderation reports, which is its whole purpose).

One last-last thought, for the people that haven't been following the discussion: An important reason that this proposal would fare better (than the current system) against potential abuse problems, is that it separates the "action" taken in response to a report from the "reward" given in response to a report. Aside from underpinning moderation reports with an adjustable incentive structure, it opens up a class of reports that could still be marked as "good" and be acted on by the mods, but that would result in no reward (0 rMerit). Presumably, most people wouldn't bother with those types of reports. Deciding what kinds of reports should go in this class (e.g. really old posts with minor rule violations) would allow theymos to stop people from trying to "grind" these badges with low-effort strategies.