This would be very helpful with current moderation issues. If we’re already feeling behind with the current userbase, imagine how bad it could get with another migration.

I’ll add more thoughts here as I have them:

• You could change the wording on the report options to clarify when a report should go to the community mods (ex. “Does this break a community rule?”). Any other issues should probably go to the admins?

  • It might help to allow community / instance admins to modify this message.

• While I don’t think admins should be removing things that were reported to the community, they should be able to remove things outside of reports (even without being a mod). Sometimes spam might get reported to the mods, but the admins need to take action. Could the ‘read only’ view add a little warning before action is taken?

Also a different but related issue:

• setting some default report options that automatically go to the admins. For example: “spam” or “NSFW”. This could allow the admins to triage content, or set better automated tools. It’s harder to do that with free form reports

Most other social networks allow users to select whether they are reporting a violation of community rules, or site rules as whole.

Why not take this approach to simplify it then?

Asking the user to specify who they think should receive a report feels like it will add confusion (not to mention is subjective anyway), and could create delays in responding to important stuff if the user picks the “wrong” option. If a user picks the mod option on csam report then it might get missed by an admin? At least the option between “this community” or “site rules” is a bit clearer.

This is to prevent cases of admins accidentally preventing mods from moderating according to their own community rules

As an admin I should be able to respond to a mod report on a community if I’m there first and its urgent, i.e. csam. This is a policy/discussion point between mods and admins on any given instance and shouldn’t be enforced in the software. Separation for clarity’s sake is fine, I even encourage that as I don’t tend to touch a report for a community anyway as it stands, but I should be able to mark a report complete if I have dealt with it. Otherwise I’m just going to go to the post and sort it out anyway, so its just adding complexity.

Admins can still always explicitly take over communities by making themselves mods, in this way, they are able to handle mod reports for any abandoned communities, etc

Barriers/extra steps to administration is not the way forward here. Continuing with Admins being able to mark reports resolved just makes sense.

Alternatively, we could make reporting even more granular. It would be possible to allow users to select only a specific instances admins as the intended report audience, for example.

No. This is a step backwards in transparency and moderation efforts. Granularity and more options is not always a good thing. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of using Meta’s report functionality you’ll know how overly complex and frustrating their report system is to use with all their “granularity”.

Simplicity of use and getting a report to someone who can do something about it quickly should always be the priority, adding options and functionality should be secondary and support this. If you don’t want to be stepping on moderators toes, make that clear in your guidelines and processes.

I am legally on the hook for content on my instance, not the moderators, and proposing changes that make it harder to be an admin is a touch annoying.

To add: I would suggest thinking about expanding this to notify the user a report has been dealt with/resolved, optionally including rationale, because that feedback element can sometimes be lacking.

This is trying to solve what having report reasons would solve. If you had admin report reasons and mod report reasons then users can focus on what is the problem with the reported content, rather than who it should go to (casual users dgaf and probably don’t even know the difference between an “instance admin” and a mod)

So I’m not a fan. Again, this feels like trying to fix a symptom of the problem (no report reasons)

Take a few minutes and look how any other site does it.

Regarding the ‘Unresolved questions’ part, the ActivityPub activity for Reports is:

{
  "actor": "http://ds9.lemmy.ml/u/lemmy_alpha",
  "to": ["http://enterprise.lemmy.ml/c/main"],
  "audience": "http://enterprise.lemmy.ml/u/main",
  "object": "http://enterprise.lemmy.ml/post/7",
  "summary": "report this post",
  "type": "Flag",
  "id": "http://ds9.lemmy.ml/activities/flag/98b0933f-5e45-4a95-a15f-e0dc86361ba4"
}

From this page. I imagine it’s up to lemmy where this actually gets sent (in the sense that if a community has 1 moderator, it goes to 1 inbox, but if it has 2 moderators, it goes to 2 inboxes).

As a mere user I have no idea what should be reported to whom. It needs to be really obvious and I’d like to see predefined categories as options, e.g. “breaks community rules” (ideally with options to select which rule was broken), “spam”, “illegal content” (remembering that what’s illegal in one place may not be illegal in others).

For reporting to admins, which admins get the report? If I’m on instance A reading a community hosted on instance B and report a comment from a user on instance C, who gets the report? It’d be really nice to see a list of those when selecting a report type, e.g. “this report will be sent to the moderators of lemmy@lemmy.ml” or “this report will be sent to the administrators of lemm.ee, lemmy.ml and startrek.website”.

Thank you for this!