Growing Successful Communities

[#1]

Many social platforms have a mechanism for members to flag a post as objectionable, and many forums label this as "abuse", so the option is often labeled "Report Abuse" or something similar.   I believe this was similar on the Lithium platform in the past, but a recent changes seems to have changed the option to "Flag for a Moderator".

Personally, I like this title better, as it sounds more neutral and objective.   However, in our community, we've noticed an increase in new members, triggering this option as a way to try to bump their thread or draw attention to their particular post.  

To counter this, we have posted a write up noting the Do's and Don'ts for using the flag for moderator option and are pointing members to it, along with some additional advice to a couple of members who are responsible for the majority of the reports.

What do you call this function in your community?    What user behaviors have you observed regarding it's use, and have you had to make any policy changes or make special communications to get the community to properly use the function?

I'm curious as to what others have experienced...

Mark

[#2]

This is one of the rare occasions where Mark and I disagree since I preferred the original wording because it was more clear about the purpose.

Jane

[#3]

What about making two different possibilities in the list of options that users can perform? 

But make the actual outcome the same - ie, send the mods a notification?

[#4]

Rho,

Well, that's an approach but I think we'd need wording that really made clear the difference and I would then like to see a community manager (admin) choice as to which (none, either, both) were displayed, perhaps even contolled via role permissions.

I.e. - Report abuse might be just that - reporting personal abuse, profanity, hate speech, etc, etc.   This might be enabled to all members

Flag for moderator, might be "summon a moderator" and could be reserved for super users who might want to selectively note individuals in need of help, but that is a pretty specific use case and borders on an "escalate" function from the pull down.

I have our community configured to copy the abuse reports (flag for moderator) to a private board for archival record purposes and message / email the moderation team.  I believe all the mods receive the messages, so whomever can respond first can.  I could change to "round robin" option which provides a rotation and could mitigate some of their concerns which I believe related to being peppered with request to attend to things they would get to anyway as a normal course of their activities.   But, round robin could let sometings potentially fall through the gaps if the list of those on rotation weren't tightly managed.

Volume probably plays into this as well...

Thoughts from others?

Mark

[#5]

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Mark_Hopkins wrote:

Well, that's an approach but I think we'd need wording that really made clear the difference and I would then like to see a community manager (admin) choice as to which (none, either, both) were displayed, perhaps even contolled via role permissions.

I.e. - Report abuse might be just that - reporting personal abuse, profanity, hate speech, etc, etc.   This might be enabled to all members

Flag for moderator, might be "summon a moderator" and could be reserved for super users who might want to selectively note individuals in need of help, but that is a pretty specific use case and borders on an "escalate" function from the pull down.

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Now that's an idea that I would vote for!

Jane

[#6]

Well, yes, that's pretty much the system that my forum has in place as well - any of these "flag for mod" notifications goes into a board specifically designed to be the repository for those, and only those.  I think our forum uses the wording "Report Abuse to a Moderator". 

What I was getting at in my suggestion was that, since there exists this disparity in other forums, why not just enable a user to swing from both sides?  So a user who has mostly seen "Escalate/flag for mod" or something, with a more positive connotation, has that available, even for negative posts that the user might want to report.  And "report abuse" or something similar would be there for people who are used to notifying mods of negative posts like that.  And in actuality, the mod would have somewhat of an idea what the user who flagged it was getting at when the mod receives the notification and sees which option was used to notify him, but it's not a hard and fast rule, if you will, and so the mod is notified either way and goes from there.  It's a distinction to the user but not really a big difference to the mod. 

To clarify, that's not how my forum is set up, but the OP made me think that might be a good compromise.

[#7]

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Rho wrote:

What I was getting at in my suggestion was that, since there exists this disparity in other forums, why not just enable a user to swing from both sides?  So a user who has mostly seen "Escalate/flag for mod" or something, with a more positive connotation, has that available, even for negative posts that the user might want to report.

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I think the new wording is just confusing people.  In our case, when it was changed, we went from an occasional "mom, he's picking on me!" (ok, we had some legitimate forum abuse reports, too) to several per day from members trying to use it to get product support.

I could support having "Flag for a moderator" as an optional choice that could be limited by role.

Jane

[#8]

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Rho wrote:

What about making two different possibilities in the list of options that users can perform? 

But make the actual outcome the same - ie, send the mods a notification?

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It's always a balancing act when you present choices to a user. Advanced users are always clamoring for more choices, but new users tend to get confused.

This is probably why a lot of what we end up doing for our customers during new community launches is hiding various options on the main pages - home, board, thread etc. Too much choice all at once can paralyze. This is also one reason why the option menus and preference pages in the community are so large, to take all of the complexity away from the casual user, but still provide an opportunity for superusers to find it if they look.

I like "Flag for Moderator" myself (it's what we use here on the Lithosphere after all). I think its more positive, but like the wording of your guidelines I think it can depend on your community members. And it also depends on what you want your moderation team to be responding to - as jloyless mentioned earlier, it can affect the behavior of users in the community and what they use it for, so be sure to think it through.

On the other hand - will choosing one of these over the other prevent your community from being successful, or help make it wildly more successful? I don't know for sure, but I think it's unlikely. I always have to ask that question of myself before I go to far down the rabbit hole.

[#9]

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ScottD wrote:

On the other hand - will choosing one of these over the other prevent your community from being successful, or help make it wildly more successful? I don't know for sure, but I think it's unlikely. I always have to ask that question of myself before I go to far down the rabbit hole.

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I think in our case it just raises expectations that it's a conduit to get (official) product support.  If the new forum member is already angry, it's one more thing for them to add to their list.  On the other hand, Mark posted a couple of notes in the Welcome and Housekeeping sections, and it's slowed down for now.

Jane

[#10]

I'm with Jane on this.

We've had a bunch of posts "flagged" for no apparent reason since we switched to the new platform -- clearly the users don't have a clue.

To my mind, "flag for a moderator" is an almost perfectly meaningless phrase - in that it could mean whatever the user imagines it means. You shouldn't need a help file for something this simple.  If you mean "report abuse," say that.  If you mean something esle, say what it is. 

  -- Mike