Managing reported content in IP.Board 2 and our first party applications for IP.Board 2 is decentralized. When a user reports a post due to inappropriate content, moderators assigned to the area in question will receive either a private message or an email to alert them to the post, and it is then expected that a moderator address the inappropriate content. It can become difficult to track who has done what, whether the report has been addressed, and so on.
Luke wrote an addon for IP.Board 2 that addresses this issue and centralizes the reported content into one area. This addon was so well received (and in our opinion, needed) that (with his permission) we are incorporating his Report Center addon into IP.Board 3 out of the box.
For those of you familiar with his modification, you will already be aware of what it does and how it works. For the rest of us, here's a brief summary of how the changes work and the associated benefits.
Firstly, all reported content from all applications are added into a central repository for moderators to address. Moderator permissions are still honored, so your Gallery moderators who do not have access to moderate your forums will not be presented with these reports. By bringing everything into one area, your moderators can quickly determine how many outstanding and unresolved reports are pending action. Multi-moderation is also available in the report center so you can quickly prune reports, or change statuses for multiple reports at once.
Statuses and severity levels can be set to help you identify which reports require attention first. You can configure severity levels based on "points" for the number of times an item has been reported, and based on age (so the oldest reports will be highlighted as needing more attention). Icons can be associated with the severity levels so that you can customize the final display. Reports can have basic "open", "closed" and "active" statuses, and you can configure additional statuses as you wish.
Moderators can comment on the report in private, allowing them (and you) to leave notes about what has been done, whether the offending user has been contacted, and to ask questions. The comments cannot be deleted by the moderators, allowing you to retain a log of moderator activity on the board.
When multiple users report an item and an active report is already opened for that item, all of the subsequent reports are stored with the original report to provide a more organized system for your moderators to work with. Combined with the severity levels, this can help you to more quickly identify things that need to be addressed on the board.
You can still configure the system to send private message or email notifications when content is reported after it is added to the queue, if you prefer to still receive notifications. An indicator for moderators is added to the top of the page identifying how many active reports (that you can access) are open, and when viewing reported content an indicator is displayed to moderators if the content has been reported.
Additionally, if you use Luke's report center modification presently, your existing Report Center data will be retained upon upgrading to IP.Board 3 - we are keeping his same table names during the upgrade, so all of your current reports will still be available.
We hope the addition of this new feature will help administrators and moderators manage their community easier and with more organization than in previous versions.