Mastodon Style Reporting options

[DraconicNEO]

Hello I think it would be a good idea for us to implement a multi-option type reporting menu similar to what you have on Mastodon, where the reports can be chosen either to forward or not to both external instances but also community moderators.
One very big problem on Lemmy is that community moderators are able to resolve reports and essentially hide them from admins. This can lead to malicious communities skirting the rules of the instance for a long time because the mods keep shooting down reports.

If we had a system that allowed people to choose where to send reports it could fix a lot of these problems by allowing users to bypass community mods or the admins of specific reported instances.

I made a mockup of the idea in Lemmy-ui to give an example of what this feature could look like

[gaviscapes]

Agreed. This is a threat vector I've seen exploited heavily on lemmy. Having at least a way to escalate reports directly to admins is needed.

[Pdzly]

I would see abuse potential there too,if you dont like community mods => spam the admins full.

I would say, it will be ALWAYS be "sent" to the local admins, then those can send it to the remote admin

And a way to ban escalation on specific users is needed too, otherwise trolls will only send it to admins ( where admins are less than community mods )

[DraconicNEO]

I would see abuse potential there too,if you dont like community mods => spam the admins full.

I would say, it will be ALWAYS be "sent" to the local admins, then those can send it to the remote admin

And a way to ban escalation on specific users is needed too, otherwise trolls will only send it to admins ( where admins are less than community mods )

I can see how that would be an issue. Though I also know that report abuse will always be a problem, so I'm not too keen on crippling the system to favor moderators more just because a few bad actors might abuse it.

IMO the best way to deal with report abuse isn't to limit how people can report content, but to simply punish people who make bad-faith false reports. Doing so naturally biases the population towards making correct and meaningful reports as trolls and spammers are banned from the platform.

[jgrim]

Perhaps another option is for instances to register if they want reports sent to their admins. For example, I can set a default setting for reporting back. I can also edit the instance in the admin and enable/disable notifications. The setting is federated to other instances and they know if to send it back or not. Default to true if not setting is set.

What do you think of this @lazyguru ?

[lazyguru]

I'm not sure I understand the problem? Even if a mod resolves a report, the instance admin can still see the report (you just switch to the "all" view instead of the default "unread")

[lazyguru]

Additionally, I would be opposed to the excluding moderators from getting reports. The whole point of a moderator is to take work off the hands of the instance admin. If there is a problem with a moderator, that's when the user should be DMing an instance admin (I guess I could be in favor of functionality to allow for reporting a moderator to "all admins of the instance the community/moderator is on" so that you don't have to lookup and then DM a specific one)

[lionirdeadman]

I think this is important. There are a couple of reasons that I can think of.

• Reporting things can be an harassment vector for the reporter. One of the actors receiving the report could decide to harass the reporter.
• People will differ on who they trust with their reports. Reporting things can often be sensitive and having the choice could result in something being reported at all rather than not.
• As mentioned, moderators may act to hide certain types of reports before they get to admins. I don't think many admins would look at the "all" pile - especially on large instances.

As a side note, a "message all mods of x community" or "message all instance admins of x instance" feature could indeed be nice for non-reporting things. Otherwise, information tends to get split up when people try contacting mods/instance admins. (A seperate issue should be made for this)

[lazyguru]

This (potentially) will only work for communities hosted on Sublinks. If a community is hosted on Lemmy, all reports are visible in the modlog (eg, you can see everything one of the users on the Discuss Online instance reported against a community hosted there OR on another instance as well as any report from a user on another instance about something in a community hosted on Discuss Online https://discuss.online/modlog. WARNING: clicking that link will show you content that might be triggering). I think this feature is going to require some careful planning to try to account for different scenarios.

[DraconicNEO]

I'm not sure I understand the problem? Even if a mod resolves a report, the instance admin can still see the report (you just switch to the "all" view instead of the default "unread")

That is true but also makes it much more likely that the reports won't be seen at all, considering that instances will receive many hundreds if not thousands of reports a day that all get legitimately resolved most admins and indeed mods won't be scrolling through the read/resolved reports feed unless they're killing time. So for all intents and purposes resolved reports are dead reports and won't ever be seen again.

Additionally, I would be opposed to the excluding moderators from getting reports. The whole point of a moderator is to take work off the hands of the instance admin. If there is a problem with a moderator, that's when the user should be DMing an instance admin (I guess I could be in favor of functionality to allow for reporting a moderator to "all admins of the instance the community/moderator is on" so that you don't have to lookup and then DM a specific one)

This line of thinking puts way too much faith in moderators, considering on most instances anyone can create a community and essentially become a moderator, no review or processing required. This means we absolutely need systems that can handle rouge or malicious moderators, same as malicious users.

This (potentially) will only work for communities hosted on Sublinks. If a community is hosted on Lemmy, all reports are visible in the modlog (eg, you can see everything one of the users on the Discuss Online instance reported against a community hosted there OR on another instance as well as any report from a user on another instance about something in a community hosted on Discuss Online https://discuss.online/modlog. WARNING: clicking that link will show you content that might be triggering). I think this feature is going to require some careful planning to try to account for different scenarios.

One thing that could be done (would be better as a different issue) would be to anonymize reports sent to other instances, similar to what mastodon does, that way locally admins and mods would see the username of the person in the report, but on the remote instances which may or may not be lemmy instances they would only see the domain of the origin of the report. It wouldn't solve the issue of mods dismissing reports maliciously on those instances but would solve the harassment issues that I and @lionirdeadman mentioned by making it so remote admins and mods can't identify reporters and harass them.

[lionirdeadman]

This (potentially) will only work for communities hosted on Sublinks.

Just a clarification: modlogs contain only actions made by moderators or instance admins. It does not contain information about reports. The problem vector is different.

[DraconicNEO]

This (potentially) will only work for communities hosted on Sublinks.

Just a clarification: modlogs contain only actions made by moderators or instance admins. It does not contain information about reports. The problem vector is different.

I think they meant to say the federated report queue, not the modlog.