After 8 months, I get my first “report” from a user. The email that is generated by diaspora says this:
the comment with ID [numeric ID] was marked as offensive.
Reason: delete this https://a.grumpy.world/report
Please review as soon as possible!
Presumably ‘delete this’ is what the reporter typed. So I go to the Admin interface on my pod. There is a link to the post (link removed for privacy reasons). So my first confusion is this ID number [Numeric ID] that is in the email. I can’t find any reference to that number anywhere else in the UI. That link to the reported post has a long GUID. The other thing that is weird is that (from my viewpoint), the author of the post, the author of the comment, and the person reporting the post seem to be all the same person.
Another reason i am confused is that this is not a user on my pod, a post on my pod, or a comment from a user on my pod. I’m confused as to why this report ended up in my inbox and what action I’m expected to take.
Lastly, I don’t have information on the reporter. Maliciously reporting posts for moderation in bad faith is a common way to harass users. So I am interested to see who has reported it. I can look up “details on reported user” but I cannot look up “details on reporting user.”
Anybody want to enlighten me on how “reporting” is expected to work?
Hi Paco, and thank you for raising this issue. Somebody familiar with the reporting interface may get in touch to you later on.
I have taken the liberty to remove the personally identifying details of the person being reported. They’re not essential to your issue, and as a privacy-sensitive community, we prefer to keep details like “who is being reported” from being public.
Besides the confusion, never forget that a report is not a command to do something. I report is just a message from another user that he or she feels that a post is inappropriate. This does not mean that you find the post inappropriate. After all: your pod, your rules!
The ID in the mail is the comment ID, it isn’t visible in the UI, but it is the comment with the guid the report links to. You could also find the ID in the database, but you don’t need to. But in the mail it’s the ID to not have any info about author or content of the comment in the mail.
The person reporting is not the same as the author of the post or comment. A person can’t report themselves or can’t report comments from their posts, they can only delete them directly. Also the reporter is somebody of your pod. You can see that person in the top right corner:
I’m not at all confused about my role as a pod administrator. I’m confused as to why I’m receiving this report and what the content of the report means.
Users can feel whatever they like. In this case, why are they telling ME about it? I agree that it’s “my pod, my rules” but I can’t find any way that my pod is involved in this. The user isn’t on my pod, the post isn’t on my pod (except by federation), and I’m not sure if the reporter is on my pod (I think they aren’t).
Thanks, @supertux88. Since you guys don’t want links or personal information here, I don’t know how to prove it to you. The user name that is at the top right corner in my Admin interface is exactly the same user (and links to the same remote profile) as the user who made the original post. And the user who made the comment that is being reported is the same also. That post has only one comment on it.
So i’m not confused about how to know who the reporter is. I’m confused about what has actually happened.
You could’ve switched your UI to English for explaining purposes, this is legible for less than 0.1% of world’s population
The reporter is on your pod. Users from other pods cannot report posts on your pod.
As for why they can report posts that are not from your pod: You have the ability to remove the content nonetheless, and should do so if legally required in your or your server’s country. That’s also the reason you are being told about it – it’s your pod, and despite the content not originating from your pod, you can – at least in some countries – be held legally responsible for hosting a copy.
Good explanation for why I might need to delete it. I appreciate that.
But in my Admin interface, the reporter is a link to a remote profile on another pod. It is not a link to a local profile on my instance. This contradicts the statement that only users on my pod can report content on my pod.
It technically impossible that remote people can report a user, first there is no federation message for it yet, and second the reports are linked to a user-ID, which are only local people. So the person linked in the top-right corner must be a local person.
Sigh. You are right. I am wrong. It is a local user. They are user XYZ (not their ID) on my pod, and then they are XYZ on some other pod as well.
But they maintain another profile? It’s weird. They have a local account with the same name and it seems to either repost or originally post all the same content as another profile they have on a different pod. So either it’s a malicious person who has created a lookalike account on my pod, or it’s a confused person with multiple accounts on multiple pods and they’ve reported their own writing on one pod using my pod.
I’m not likely to take any action. It doesn’t make any sense at all.
Oh, that explains it. I can see why this would be confusing, especially if not yet familiar with the reporting interface.
I assume this is a person that either migrated from another pod to yours with whatever tools there are to recreate their content (or did so by hand), and wants the content from the old user removed, or, and this is where you are right in that you cannot tell it apart with reasonable certainty, it is a malicious user trying to create exactly this image.
If they still had access to their old account, they could delete all their content themselves … maybe they lost their credentials, maybe the pod rendered itself broken or disappeared. In any case, you can’t know for sure.
This is my (personal) recommendation as well, as long as you don’t have more information.
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