Lootman wrote:A report of the use of a banned word is probably the easiest case to deal with, I'd agree. A simple search will reveal it. Even so it took a longish paragraph there to describe the if-then-else logic to be employed in that case. ...
Describing and doing don't take the same length of time for all sorts of everyday activities - try describing how to make a cup of tea, for instance, with full details of all the if-then-else cases that might arise. Why should moderation be different?
Lootman wrote:... And a mod would also have to allow for some other cases, such as someone cunningly misspelling it to evade detection e.g. "Nasi", "N*zi" or "Nazzi".
Only if they're required to adhere perfectly to your standards - otherwise the "bounce it back to the reporter to clarify" technique will do the job. One can make
any task near-impossible by demanding such perfectionism - if one is in a position to make demands about how moderators behave, which you, I and the rest of us (apart from stooz and Clariman) are not. And even they are only in a position to demand that
or the moderator's resignation, and there are definite drawbacks for them if moderators choose the second option at all often...
Lootman wrote:... el referred earlier to a "common type" of problem that can't be dealt with that way when she stated that "We can also see when people are revenge reporting. You'd be surprised how much that happens."
In such a case it is not sufficient to look at the reported post and the alleged technical infringement. A moderator would also have to look for motive by looking at the overall context to see if the two parties were having a fight and one party (probably the one who was losing the debate) suddenly decided to report something that they had previously let slide.
Even if the moderator were to do that and find that the two parties had been having a heated argument and one of them suddenly decided to report something they'd not reported earlier in the discussion, inferring a revenge motive isn't a reasonable thing for a moderator to do. For example, I not infrequently encounter cases where someone has quoted me out of context by editing the quote down too much and as a result have replied to a point I didn't make, not the one I did. I'll very rarely deal with that by reporting it straight away: instead, I'll reply to supply the missing context and try to take the discussion back to what I actually said. It's tedious to have to do that, but people (including me, by the way - I'm not claiming to be perfect about such things!) do sometimes miss important context and it would be complete overkill to haul in a moderator every time it happens - and most times, whoever quoted me out of context accepts it and the discussion starts making progress again.
But occasionally, someone does it again and again, and oddly enough, on each occasion it gives them an easy counter-argument to make against what the out-of-context quote appears to be saying... At some point, I find myself no longer able to believe it isn't deliberate or completely careless disruption of the discussion, and at that point I am liable to start reporting it. From the outside, that will look just like the situation you describe, but my motive in doing so is not revenge. And by the way, often the other party clearly wants the discussion to head in a different direction. That's absolutely fine by me, but if I'm not interested in that direction, I prefer simply not saying anything about it - but will make it clear that I'm afraid I'm not interested and am not going to comment on it if too directly challenged to do so. Equally, it's absolutely fine by me if the other party isn't interested in the direction I've taken my comments and simply doesn't say anything about them. In both cases, if no-one else takes the discussion further in the direction concerned, that's life...
The one other point I'll make about revenge reporters is that IMHO the best way is to
frustrate them. Posters can best do that by giving them as few things as possible to report (pay particular attention to the "play the ball, not the man" principle) and
not posting about their suspicions that revenge reporting is happening (if it does need to be mentioned, a PM to the moderator rewards the revenge reporter much less - commenting on the matter in public tells the revenge reporter that they're getting to you). Moderators can best do it by dealing with reports in as low-key a way as they can: edit them minimally to remove the problem if they find the report valid, do nothing to the post otherwise (this is one place where TLF moderators' ability to edit posts really scores over the TMF moderators' delete-or-do-nothing choice). If posters and moderators both do those things, the outcome is that the revenge reporter gets little reaction and runs out of things they can validly report, and then
either gives up
or resorts to making invalid reports. In the second case, they're wasting the moderators' time, which is something I'm sure the moderators can deal with - and
will if the revenge reporter persists in doing so!
Gengulphus