Mass flagging abuse

When a single post or individual receives a lot of reports, it goes to our Moderation team for review while hiding the post once a certain threshold is reached. While the intent here is to hide stuff that the community feels is against the Code of Conduct, you are correct in that some individuals try to weaponize the reporting system. We can and do take action against people who abuse our reporting systems, but I wanted to go into a bit more depth on how we do it and how we hope to improve.

Currently, we review the flags in a Review queue. Here we can see all of the individuals who reported a post and what their flag reasons are, as well as their flag history. As you know individual characters are treated as singular accounts, so some will try to use multiple alts to flag a post. We can see this, and will suspend a user for systems abuse (which scales duration based on previous penalties, culminating in permanent loss of forum permissions). There are some ambitious plans to group character/account on the moderation side more clearly in the future (for example, we want things like Trust Level to share across characters. Account actions already work across characters).

One of the requests we have in to further improve how we monitor and support community health is to more easily surface these bad actors through reporting*. These data points and dashboards take time to get developed and updated, but it’s something we do take seriously and are working with partners on how to handle these types of infractions more intelligently with data rather than looking at reactionary reporting.

Something that you can do to help us: If you are confident that you are being harassed by someone exploiting the reporting system, contact our Moderation team. A link to the reported post is extremely helpful, as is any links to previous or similar behavior. From there our Moderation team can review that person’s flag history and determine if further action needs to be taken.

*Edit: For clarification, the use of “reporting” here is more of the analytical kind of report, where we can pull data on potential malicious use of the flag system.

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