Reporting vs the Spam / Troll button

So now that the site has been running for a while, several of us have realized that everyone can see who has hit the Spam/Troll button which might make some people hesitate to hit it unless others have hit it first if they are willing to hit it at all.

The only solution to this problem is to remove the ability to see who has made any rating, which means that people can see what ratings have been received, but nobody can see the list that shows who gave what rating... to be clear this includes any type of rating including Likes.

Unfortunately after doing some testing, disabling the ability to view the rating list does not disable the alerts that users receive when a rating has been given so they will still see who gave each rating if they pay attention to their alerts.

To make matters worse, I do not get alerted when the Spam/Troll button is pushed and also do not get alerted when a post is automatically hidden after 5 users have rated a post as Spam/Troll.

So what does this all mean? People should feel comfortable reporting posts even if they are not comfortable hitting the Spam/Troll button.

If you are comfortable hitting the Spam/Troll button, it is still beneficial to do both because if 5 users hit it the post will be hidden if it happens before I get a chance to review the moderation report.

So to summarize, if you see a post that is spammy or trolling do one of the following:

• Report the Post
• Report the Post and hit the Spam / Troll button

Thanks and as always, just let me know if you have any questions