What happens to reports that 'disappear' from the counter with no message/note from moderators?

[iplaygoaswell]

• edit - thanks everyone, too tedious to figure out who it was again now that the report has disappeared but will keep in mind next time when a report feels like it’s been a while.

Filed a report I think last week against a user who was trashtalking and insulting in chats. Was waiting for a resolution or message (like the pop-ups we usually get about a report) but the report has disappeared from the blue triangle counter up top. I checked ‘tools’ and ‘report counter’ and my reports, but there’s nothing on that page. I can’t remember which user it was, and I wasn’t able to find a list of users I’ve blocked. Anyone know where I can find the report I filed?

Not a big deal for less serious reports but in this case I filed it for harassment.

[marek.msk]

Had the same issue a few weeks ago. I reported a sandbagger, who used bots to artificially manipulate his rank. The report disappeared after a few days. I didn’t get a note about the outcome.

[Conrad_Melville]

When reports you have filed disappear from your blue triangle and you do not receive a notice, it means that the system automatically culled the report. This happens when a report has not been resolved within a certain amount of time. The time limits vary by category, but I don’t know all the specific limits. I suggest filing the report again if you remember the game or the player.

[Atorrante]

@iplaygoaswell

wasn’t able to find a list of users I’ve blocked.

You can find blocked players under: Settings > Blocked Players

[Groin]

When your report is cancelled sadly by lack of moderators, it still takes more as a bit of days. Sorry for the inconvenience anyway.

[noob42]

Few weeks back, I had filed a report over a User saying slurs and death threats in the chat when he lost the games. He lost to me and was rude in the chat. So, I checked his others games where he had lost, andhe was going full-blown death threats and slurs to the family. I reported it but never heard back anything about it. And then one day that report disappeared. So I have no way to find out what happened.

[shinuito]

They got a warning and their chat privileges revoked.

I didn’t deal with it personally, I’m just checking it now.

Normally we do try to message users to let them know we’re dealing with or dealt with the report. Apologies for that

[junubia]

I filed a report yesterday. For the rest of the day and this morning I had the blue report notification on my top bar till it just disappeared and I assume was handled.

I don’t want a moderator to have to take more of their limited time to message me about whatever decision was made.

But could the record of the report still be visible to me somewhere? Right now it does feel like it just vanished and that is after being the most attention grabbing thing on the site for the last 24 hours - a pending notification.

I checked under My Reports, which seems the logical place and it shows nothing. Maybe that is for reports against me?

I also have no feedback to inform my future behaviour. Was my report a helpful contribution as a responsible member of OGS community? A waste of the moderation teams time? A disparaging and false accusation?

[noob42]

This is something that has bothered me about the report as well. At that time a Moderator DMed to tell me about my case. Which is very kind of them.

But yes, I do wish that:

1. I could see my past report
2. And their results (or commentary)

I am willing to put development time on this feature. (I’ll talk to dev team)

[junubia]

I did now get a DM from and had a good conversation with the mod who dealt with it. They had been busy. A personal touch is always good but maybe not necessary especially in busy times for normal reports.

From their side , they could see reports as either pending, claimed, or resolved. As users if we could see this status on our reports, that would be great. Then nuanced or serious reports, like the death threats earlier in this thread, could be followed up with DM as needed.

Play Go at online-go.com! | OGS - My Reports page simply shows as blank for me, and I believe the report notification disappeared on my side when it was marked as claimed.

Kudos for pledging dev time to this and thanks as well to all the rest of the moderators and developers who spend their time on keeping it all running.

[Eugene]

The description of what happens is correct: after a certain amount of time (different for different types of reports) they are “culled”.

What this means is they disappear from the “active” queue and are unlikely to be looked at unless something specific happens (like another report on that person, or attention bring drawn to it for some reason).

Culled reports aren’t deleted - they are still on the person’s record.

Note that “disappeared” doesn’t necessarily mean “culled”, though more often that is true. While we try to respond to all reports that we handle, sometimes that can get accidentally overlooked.

If you have reported something that is heinous - something that really needs to be dealt with it is appropriate to raise it with a moderator - either direct by PM or in OGSs #help chat.

One challenge we face is that we can loose reports about heinous behaviour in the noise of reports about trivial behaviour, and it is_perfectly fine_ to alert us if this has happened.

We are also working continuously on better systems for scaling up how we can handle reports.

A huge thanks to the Community Moderator volunteers who have helped make it so that Stopped Playing, Stalling and Score Cheating are now usually handled within 1-2 days, and very rarely culled.

[Atorrante]

Yesterday I reported a player for harassment, who had already been reported for sandbagging. Report vanished and also not visible in Reports Centre.
But I screenshotted the harassing game chat and do remember the name of that annoying and offensive player.

For more info

Haha, did you now really expect me to tell you the name of that player and share that screenshot with you?
On OGS we do not name and shame players! We leave it to the moderators.
But feedback about what action they took, would be appreciated greatly!

[Eugene]

@Atorrante

But feedback about what action they took, would be appreciated greatly!

When I said

@Eugene

While we try to respond to all reports that we handle, sometimes that can get accidentally overlooked.

I had thought that it implied we do understand that feedback is appreciated greatly. Afterall, that’s why we try to respond to all reports that we handle. It’s always a kind of “oh drat” experience to learn when we missed one.

I also hoped you would appreciate that if the issue you reported was heinous you should follow it up in the way I described, and that if it wasn’t so bad then if you haven’t heard it’s either an accident or because we’re dealing with things that are so bad.

Which tells us that either you should follow up with a moderator (because it’s bad) or just accept that you didn’t hear (because it’s not so bad, and there are known reasons why you didn’t hear).

In no situation is a post in this thread very likely to deliver any followup, especially without any details.

[Lord_o_o_Spoon]

It may be worth considering having a menu when reporting an incident, so that the users can select the type of offence that is being committed, and that they are reporting. Having this system in place should, in theory, make it far easier on the moderator end to determine what is…more henious, vs what is an innocuous misunderstanding.

It may also be worth considering that the moderation team may need to be expanded, as the cracks in the ability of the moderation team to manage reports are becoming more apparent. I don’t say that as a criticism, but as a means of assessing the need for more moderators. In my own time, I’ve run debate groups online, and it can be hard to know when to take on new members. However, it’s nearly always a good idea, especially when reports aren’t being seen to before they disappear/ get culled, and with a userbase as large as OGS has.

[Eugene]

@Lord_o_o_Spoon

It may be worth considering having a menu when reporting an incident, so that the users can select the type of offence that is being committed, and that they are reporting. Having this system in place should, in theory, make it far easier on the moderator end to determine what is…more henious, vs what is an innocuous misunderstanding.

That’s what we currently have. It’s what lets us send different types of reports to different pools of people (eg full moderators, community moderators, AI cheat assessors etc)

Or do you mean more nuanced, as “with some indication of heinousness”?

I’m not convinced that “heinoussness indication” would help in practice, though maybe it’s something we could consider

Right now the efforts are going into making our moderation efforts scale better, rather than incrementally improving what the current full moderation team does.

@Lord_o_o_Spoon

It may also be worth considering that the moderation team may need to be expanded, as the cracks in the ability of the moderation team to manage reports are becoming more apparent. I don’t say that as a criticism, but as a means of assessing the need for more moderators. In my own time, I’ve run debate groups online, and it can be hard to know when to take on new members.

For sure we know it! We are tackling it in a number of ways:

• Continually looking for opportunities to add full moderators.

Although it has been firmly established that the current “way moderation is done, relying on a team of full moderators to carry the load” simply does not scale and is already past breaking point, we are still looking to add new ones. This is just an unbelievably difficult, high effort and high risk undertaking. But we genuinely are doing this.

• Expanding the team with Community Moderators. In the last 12 months the Community Moderation team has dramatically increased the “moderation team”, with the contributions of at least 20 extra people. Some of these have done a month or two, others tirelessly work at it from the beginning till now.

This method of moderating scales. Onboarding a Community Moderator is far far less effort and risk than the old style moderator, and far far less commitment and stress for those who step up.

The only trick is: Community Moderation it is amenable to some types of reports better than others - we’ve got it going on the “most amenable” ones.

However, it’s nearly always a good idea, especially when reports aren’t being seen to before they disappear/ get culled, and with a userbase as large as OGS has.

I hope you can see that we take this very seriously, and is in fact the top priority for my own contributions to OGS, ongoing.

The fact that reports get culled is not something viewed as “just how it has to be”. Rather it is “a recognised symptom of the need for substantial change” … and we’re working away at that change.

[Lord_o_o_Spoon]

dude…for real, thanks for the response.

1. I didn’t actually know that the reporting system had changed so much; it’s been years since I had to use it. I think it’s fantastic that you already have a means in place for classifying the reports…that was exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. But there could, I suppose, be a secondary filter attached to each instance, with a series of options that break down that issue into more reliably parsable information so you know what is going on more accurately, but that seems like a lot of time, honestly, and I’m not actually convinced that adding so many qualifying factors will help anything.

2. To be completely honest, I’ve never had a bad experience with an OGS moderator. To me, it’s always seemed that you guys take your roles extremely seriously, and I’ve been using OGS for like ten years now.

3. With regard to the culled reports… I wonder if there are certain types of reports that are statistically more likely to be left alone and fall through cracks than others? We can make the assumption that the vast majority of reports are for petty nonsense, that typically needs only a slap on the proverbial wrist… with those reports taking the majority of “Report Space”, is it at all likely that, because of this, mods just aren’t getting to see the more serious reports being made?

((rereading through the comment you said…I realise that you already answered this partly by saying that community moderators are more amenable to some reports over others… I find that interesting. I wonder if there is a way to mitigate that, sort of like having a code of conduct…but then you probably already have that, and there really is only so much work you can expect volunteers to take up on their own, I suppose.))

4, While I have moderated a debate group in the past, and I feel like i have some insight into how hard it can sometimes be to do the job, i think its fair to also say, tht there is a valley or more difference between moderating a couple of hundred people one place, to moderating a website with tens of thousands of members, with thousands of members being active at any given moment of the day. So I totally get that I’m probably out of my depth… and respect the work the moderation team does.

Thanks again for taking the time to humour me. It’s much appreciated!

[Conrad_Melville]

@Lord_o_o_Spoon

But there could, I suppose, be a secondary filter attached to each instance, with a series of options that break down that issue into more reliably parsable information so you know what is going on more accurately,

That already exists in the form of Reporter Notes, a box where the reporter can describe what happened in more detail.

[GreenAsJade]

Yeah - I think LoS was hoping we could automatically prioritize reports that the reporter marks as “heinous”.

This has something going for it, especially in a category like “Inappropriate content” where we get reports ranging from “Heinous porn in an avatar” to “look, this might not be a problem, just letting you know”.

The only reason I don’t leap on it is that we’re putting efforts into scaling the system so that we ideally wouldn’t need fixes of this sort, and we can only work on so many different things at once!

(There’s also a pragmatic concern, which is that a chunk of reporters feel that their report is urgent where perhaps we might not agree so much, but maybe that’s secondary).

[Conrad_Melville]

I was going to say something like your last paragraph. Reporters are not good judges even of the category (witness that stalling and stopped playing are still often mixed up), so I’m not sure they would be much help in judging the degree of urgency.