How to handle reported posts

Can someone clarify the best way to simply dismiss posts that end up in the "Reports" queue?

This post was flagged because of spam automation, but it is live on our community. Last time this happened, I believe I clicked "approve" but then a duplicate of the post was posted to our site. I assume if I click "reject," it will be removed from the site which we don't want.

What is the best way to get posts simply removed from the reports queue in the backend? I will also echo the feedback again that this experience feels overly complex with too many queues.

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Shauna

Hey @saramaloney sorry I just saw this one! The behaviour you are describing sounds like a bug to me!

We are working on cmdv2 (you can see a sneak peek in our spring product webinar) and I agree with you that too much complexity is never a good thing! I'll make sure this bug gets fixed and that we provide options for things to be simpler in this new version!

JasonHill

I'm also not a fan of the current implementation @Shauna because we want to have a record of everything in case of future dispute. We typically just want to move spam to our hidden board. But if we get a spam report, the team don't know what to do. If they mark it as spam, it is deleted forever. If they approve it, it is visible on the community until they scramble to manually move it. And we are concerned we are "teaching" the tool that such posts aren't actually spam…

We would like more flexibility to be able to choose what happens when we mark something as spam (move to a hidden spam board rather than delete).

Thanks,

Jason

s_andrews

Yes.

I've gotten used to it. It's part of my daily routine to view the Spam Queue and the Moderation Queue to assess what's there and try to figure out how it got there.

I've long been an advocate of the system a lot of forums us of keeping removed items in-line and in context in a way that gives admin/moderatos the way to see it. xenForo and vBulletin give you a little notice you can click to see what was deleted.

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Shauna

Thanks so much for sharing this — this feedback is super valuable as we keep moving forward with Community Management Dashboard V2.

I also wanted to call out that the deleted “tombstone” experience does already exist today for removed posts (as shown above for regular users). With our upcoming DSA work, we’re also exploring a more structured version of this — including how it would appear to the user whose content was removed, as well as a clearer view for admins:

User whose content was removed:

admin view

As you can see in the admin view, admins/mods can click on the escalation to see additional details on the post, moderation process, and any appeals in flight in the back end of the CMD.

Regular users would just see the tombstone like in the test comment I deleted above here.

On the reporting side, we hear you on the need to retain a record of what’s been reviewed. We’re actively exploring ways to support this — most likely through the custom dashboards we previewed in today’s Spring webinar, where you could create a dedicated view for archived reports and retain that history more easily.

Right now, our thinking is that the tombstone pattern makes the most sense for posts that were live on the site and then removed, rather than for content that was pre-moderated and never appeared publicly in the first place - curious if you all agree or if you'd want to see pre moderated content with that front end tombstone as well?

Would love to hear what you all think about that approach. Please keep the feedback coming — it’s incredibly helpful as we shape this experience :)

s_andrews

The visibility for end users would be an issue for us with this approach (Showing it either to users in general, or the affected user)

Often when we remove content we want to do it very quietly - avoiding speculation on why a post has been removed.
It's our choice whether to discretely tell the user why we removed it, or just not.

When members currently notice content is removed, I've seen it invite lots of speculation, debate and disruption. Sometimes even celebration.

"I see your post has been removed proving how offensive you were"

or even the other way round -
"Why have you blanked my post? Now people in the thread think it was because I was being abusive. If you've removed my post then I demand you remove these users' posts…"

It would also be bit of a mess where a lot of posts are removed.

On a discussion today, I remove about a page from the end where it changed from answering a question into a hostile debate about government policy. So I was removing the hostile posts, and also reasoned posts where a user had just quoted the hostile post. It would result in a page mostly made up of tombstones.