quoting_mungo
Well-Known Member
No worries; this thread has contained enough content erroneously posted in General as illustration of arguments of the rules being too lax that it didn’t occur to me that you might not have been presenting it straight.
To expand on this, now that I have time, the one major technical solution I can think of to streamline reporting and the handling of reports would be to rejigger the ticket system to where there are direct report buttons/links in association with content (submissions, journals, user profiles, comments, shouts) to generate and populate reports, and a corresponding backend system to consolidate tickets concerning the same content. This would entail a major overhaul for smaller benefit than it might seem at first glance. The big win would be that staff would receive reasonably unified reports, far as formatting (in a wider sense, including wording, order of elements, etc) is concerned. But it would still be necessary for people to specify what rule they’re reporting the content under. It would still, in many cases, need users to add their own comments to clarify what aspects of the content they feel violates that rule. By the time that’s done, you may have shaved a couple of seconds off of the reporting process, but not any major percentage of the total time taken. Worst case, people neglect to provide the necessary auxiliary information, and at that point you’ve created a situation where the website facilitates the creation of incomplete reports that will waste both staff and user time when staff has to ask for clarification before proceeding.
Consolidating reports would require some serious consideration as for how user responses to a ticket should be handled. If user A reports a submission, and user B reports the same submission, but they each provide different auxiliary information, it would arguably be a violation of privacy to let them see each other’s comments, as well as responses to those comments. That would limit staff’s ability to respond with any specificity, even when it would otherwise be motivated to do so.
Which is not to say consolidated reports and more straightforward reporting are undesirable. They would likely be a net gain. But it’s something that would take a lot of development work and system design work, and it’s not a given that the gains will be as significant as might be initially assumed.
This is also the one aspect that could potentially be alleviated by throwing money at the problem.
FA does have, from my observations, a pretty toxic userbase. That’s not to say every user is toxic, far from, but to some degree the cow’s long out of the barn when it comes to trying to shape a positive community, so reshaping community attitude/culture is going to be a slow process at best. (As an example of just how toxic the userbase can be, look back through the comments of past Fender newspost journals. And you’d still only be seeing the portion that wasn’t extreme enough to be hidden by staff.)
I do have my reservations about some aspects of site policy. That was a major factor in my initial decision to resign - at the time I gave a date some months off in order to try to avoid leaving the site short-staffed, and “fifth anniversary of joining staff” seemed like a nice round number, so to speak.
So, by all means. In an abstract, idealistic sort of way I would like to see more community involvement in policy-making. Realistically, trying to officially do so would result in a massive shitshow that would leave no one happy. Site management tries to find the least-bad compromise/solution to situations, generally, when writing policy. Having an easily enforceable policy with a minimum of gray area (to ensure uniform enforcement) is typically a consideration. I think these are fairly reasonable things to prioritize.
And that, circling back to the original topic, is a major crux I see with making policy that restricts some of the fetishy content being objected to. If policy is to be written, it needs to be uniformly enforceable, and it needs to have minimal collateral impact on non-fetish art. I personally think that comparison to children’s cartoons isn’t entirely inappropriate when deciding whether something is innocuous enough to deserve consideration as to whether it may have been created with no erotic intent. But I will acknowledge that very little art really phases me. (Maybe because I spent five years looking specifically at violations. XD)
Sadly, I think major social media has shown that report bombing is going to be an issue if you base anything on number of reports. Placing your (gen) trust in AI has a tendency to disappoint.