Requesting Notifications of new Features

[GodlyPerfection]

First of all I wanted to say thank you guys for all the hard work you guys put into this free embeddable forum system and it is greatly appreciated.

I am the founder of ReachingPerfection.com, my personal blog for level/game design with a heavy Halo flavor. It has become home to many aspiring game/level designers in the past year. As designers we like to understand how and why things work. As a result whenever we see new things we try them out to get a good feel for it so we can use it to its best potential.

Recently a new feature was added. A flag icon for a reporting method. Naturally, our members tested it out to get a feel for how it works and how we should utilize it in the future... expecting that the reporting went to the admins of our forum. We later discovered that this was not true and were warned by a nabble administrator to stop "abusing" the feature. Those of us watching the thread all apologized and stopped what we were doing. The thread can be found here:

http://forum.reachingperfection.com/Don-t-flag-me-bro-td3172322.html

However another member of our forums was not watching this thread and he used the feature wondering the effect it would have. And we received yet another warning because of our curious nature as designers. What I'm asking is that you put out notifications of new features, like you put out notifications for us admins. Without these notifications you cannot expect members to not try it out. We should not be held at fault for not being informed.

Please consider this request. Our intentions are good and because nobody was informed of this feature addition we were accused of abusing it. I can only go so far in telling people not to try out the feature. You guys have the power to notify all users, so all I ask is that you guys use that power to keep members informed on changes so we can use things how they are supposed to be used.

[Camo]

"Click it to see what it does" is human nature. would it not make more sense that this feature sent an alert with a link to a forums admin instead of nabble. Afterall its not nabbles responsibility to monitor what folk use the software for.
Having a 'Dob to nabble' button serves only overload you guys with stuff to worry about, let forums admins deal with it, and get on with what you do best.


'Inappropriate' is highly subjective anyway, do you really want Ned Flanders sending alerts every 5 mins?

Im with GodlyPerfection.

[Peter <Nabble>]

First of all, don't worry. I just went there to ask people to stop it. :-)

Second, the thing is that one time is enough to find out what happens. I got at least 3 reports form your site.
Third, your site was the only one, among all the Nabble sites, that had this problem.

Inappropriate is subjective and that's why each type of problem is explained as much as we could do.

Site owners should take care of their sites but it is not of his sole responsibility and that's why we had to implement that feature. The intention of that is to detect not only inappropriate posts but inappropriate topics and even sites themselves.

[mywaytoo]

Read this thread for details of upcoming RSS feeds about new features.

[GodlyPerfection]

Peter <Nabble> wrote

First of all, don't worry. I just went there to ask people to stop it. :-)

Second, the thing is that one time is enough to find out what happens. I got at least 3 reports form your site.
Third, your site was the only one, among all the Nabble sites, that had this problem.

Inappropriate is subjective and that's why each type of problem is explained as much as we could do.

Site owners should take care of their sites but it is not of his sole responsibility and that's why we had to implement that feature. The intention of that is to detect not only inappropriate posts but inappropriate topics and even sites themselves.

Well good sir you definitely did not come off as just asking us to stop because my crew stops when they are told.  Comments like the quote below did not give off the impression of you just asking people to stop it and offended a lot of our visitors. I had not seen this before now, I only heard that it had happened the third time.

Nabble Staff wrote

Really? Again?
Thousands of sites and you are the only ones who are actually abusing it, creating trouble because you can't behave like mature people. It is so awkward that it's happening that we haven't even thought about what to do in this situation. But I'm sure we can think of something you won't like.
Last warning.

The problem is that nobody reads every post on every thread in every forum. Most of us don't have that kind of time, so if the thread title is not appealing enough then people just don't look at it to save time. So you cannot expect people just to know that someone else has already used the feature and were already warned. We do not have the power to put out notification boxes at the top of the forum like you guys do.

The problem that we had was that there was nothing at all explaining the feature to every single nabble member. Why were we the only ones to use the feature? Because we are inquisitive and want to use everything at our disposal to improve our community in any way possible, that is how us designers think. As a designer of this forum system, I'm sure you understand at least a little of where we are coming from. If something becomes available to us we seek to understand it so it can be better utilized. I'm sure you guys would love it if more of the least known features of nabble were actually used.

We take care of our site and that is why we experimented with this new feature so we could take care of it better. Our impression was that the reporting went to our own forum admins and not to the nabble admins. Accusing us of being immature and abusing the system crosses the line of civility and professionalism. As an ex-USAF software developer I know that situations like this could have been handled better. Please show some respect to your clients.

[Peter <Nabble>]

Well, I'm sorry if you get offended in any way.
This is a serious feature and every report is analyzed individually by people, a very time consuming activity to give our users a better service.
The thing is that not only your site was the single one with this problem but also that the behavior your visitors/members displayed was not something we could say responsible. If you read their messages as well you will notice they were playing with it, reporting each other for fun.

Again, I'm very sorry if you think the posts were disrespectful. Our intention was solely to enforce a healthy use of a safety feature. We meant no disrespect.

[Nikatorus]

As stated before, a majortity of us assumed that the reports would go to our admins, rather than to you guys. That is why we acted as we did, under the impression that our admins would take it semi-lighthardedly. We did not know it would be implemented in such a way to draw your attention away from other things, and we apologize for that.
However, there was no information given about this, and as Godly stated not everyone read the "offending" thread, so a couple of people were not "in the loop." If we had gotten notification about this new feature before implementation, I do not think we would be in this situation.

While ours may be an isolated case, I think it best that you guys notify all site admins of upcoming features so we can know what it is exactly we're gettting into, and our admins could better inform our members.

I do want to thank you guys for supporting these free forums with time and dedication. I have satisfied overall with the service I've seen. Please, keep up the good work.

[DavidJCobb]

Nikatorus wrote

If we had gotten notification about this new feature before implementation, I do not think we would be in this situation . . . I think it best that you guys notify all site admins of upcoming features so we can know what it is exactly we're gettting into, and our admins could better inform our members.

Well, it seems that Nabble has a list of new features... Unless you want something along the lines of notifying admins by email X days in advance *before* the feature goes live?

Nikatorus wrote

I do want to thank you guys for supporting these free forums with time and dedication. I have satisfied overall with the service I've seen. Please, keep up the good work.

Also, this.

[Nikatorus]

I didn't know about that page. An email would be nice.

However, I notice the announcement for the flag feature was just put up today, but the feature was implemented before that.

[mywaytoo]

I would prefer it if I, as Admin, received notification first, or at least had first crack at sorting out the problem. I don't anticipate any major issues and wouldn't want to upset anyone. But you can tell by this thread alone how easy it is to get the wrong impression when just reading textual posts.

PS. Just in passing... Are 'we' all linked up to a higher, outer Nabble level? If this is the case then I can see why Nabble would want to take control as it would be their reputation that was involved...  

[Peter <Nabble>]

I understand that, to your eyes, you feel responsible for keeping your sites clean from everything you see it is not appropriate. Following the analogy, we feel the same towards keeping Nabble clean. This is a tool to help us on that task. As your primary concern is with spam and posts that don't comply with your policy, our concern is with sites that don't comply with our policy. This was implemented as an attempt to identify those sites and take necessary actions as each case demands.
You already have moderation privileges that allow you to ban and remove posts. It is not our intention to take this responsibility from your hands, We are just adding another layer of moderation.

Those who are doing nothing wrong (the vast majority) have nothing to fear. To illustrate that, since this feature went online, 43 reports were received, no site was taken offline.
Most site owners are very good administrators and take very much care of their sites. Those who don't usually have abandoned sites which don't get reported but nothing is posted there also.
It takes someone with bad intentions from the beginning to create a site with inappropriate content as a main theme. That's what we are looking for.

Some of those categories are really illegal but some are there just to help us categorize and take necessary precautions so they are not linked to others.

[GregChapman]

Peter,

I understand your concern is for Nabble. However, I'm with Anne on this one and would like any report copied to me.

The main trouble is the wording associated with the flag. As it stands most people will assume the report is going to the Forum Admin, not Nabble Admin. (This was clearly true of the forum where you took action.)

I suspect that most forum users will not appreciate the nature of an embedded application and the possibility for multiple hosts of a single page on a site. Many won't even appreciate the difference between an ISP and a web hosting service, if they are aware of the latter at all.

So even if the flag wording was changed to "Report inappropriate content to Nabble" I'm not sure it would help. The only relationship the user will be aware of is with Forum Administrators.

In short, I'd always like to be informed of anyone clicking that button so that I can make a response to inform them of what I am doing about it. That shouldn't affect your right to post directly, and without notice, with a comment along the lines of:

"Your recent xxx (description of post/activity) contravenes to the terms and conditions that your forum administrators accepted when creating this forum. As hosts of the forum we have done xxx and must ask you to xxx in future to prevent action being taken against you, them and/or the forum."

It might also be worth including a reference to the legal framework under which you operate as that will help set your comment in context. Texas law? (Probably rather different to the UK law I'm used to! :-) )

As a complete BTW, for the sake of consistency of style of wording, could "Click to" be removed from the wording associated with the "Favorite/Star" button.

[GregChapman]

GregChapman wrote

As a complete BTW, for the sake of consistency of style of wording, could "Click to" be removed from the wording associated with the "Favorite/Star" button.

I see the "Click to" has gone and the text now says "Add this item to your favorites list".

Have you also added forum admin to the recipients of abuse reports?

[DavidJCobb]

Are we allowed to remove/hide the flag, i.e. with forum CSS?

We at RP have done just that in order to prevent further abuse of the reporting feature while this is all sorted out, explained, finalized, what have you. But if it's against some rule in the ToS, or if you (Nabble) would prefer that the flag button not be hidden, then we'll certainly remove the code and make the feature usable again.

(If you want us to restore the report button and post here saying so, but I forget to check this thread for a reply, then it may be best to contact GodlyPerfection. I'm just the (forgetful) tech admin for RP; Godly's my superior, so to speak. :\)

[Peter <Nabble>]

Unfortunately we are being pushed to comply with some rules and this flag is a requisite. It's all sorted out, I guess.
Please, restore it.

[DavidJCobb]

Peter <Nabble> wrote

Unfortunately we are being pushed to comply with some rules and this flag is a requisite. It's all sorted out, I guess.
Please, restore it.

Flag restored as per your request.