Invision Community 4: A more professional report center

Invision Community 4.7.19 contains a significant upgrade to the Report Center to improve compliance and professionalism within the reporting workflow.

The existing report center functions well enough but lacks some of the more professional tools modern communities need when managing complaints. In previous versions, a member or guest reported a piece of content, such as a comment or topic, which was then handled by the community team behind the scenes, and the report closed when dealt with. It was up to the community team to inform the original content author if any decision was made and to inform those who reported the content of the outcome. 

The Invision Community November update improves the report center with a better workflow, including asking those reporting the content the reason for the report, notifications on the report outcome, and the content author being notified as to why their content was moderated.

Now, a report can be closed as valid or rejected. These new completion statuses allow you to signal whether your team found the report valid or whether you decided that the report was not required and thus rejected.

Let's look at what has changed.

Admin Control Panel
The initial Report Center interface now has various options to control how the public reporting form works. From here, you can configure how reporting works for guests, whether they are required to leave a name (email is always required), and whether a message is required for the report.

Content Author Notifications
In this section, you can create notification templates that can optionally be sent to the author of the original content when choosing to complete or reject the report.

Report Types
In previous versions, report types were solely for automatic moderation. In this update, we've brought report types to both automatic moderation and public reporting. Gathering the reason content has been reported is vital in deciding the outcome.

Each report type can also accept a message sent to the person who made the report depending on the valid or rejected outcome via an email notification that can be opted out of.

Reporting Content
Now, when a logged-in member or a guest user reports content, they can select from one of the pre-configured report types. If a guest is making the report, they are asked to leave their details along with a message to accompany the report.

Managing Reports
When managing reports via the ModCP, the interface has been updated to make the status of the report and the reasons for the report clearer.

This screenshot shows green rows, which are new reports that still need to be managed by the team, along with yellow rows, which are currently under review. Each row of reported content can have multiple reports from different members, and the reason for those reports (such as Spam, Offensive, etc) is shown in labels.

Viewing reported content now shows more detail in the user reporting section. If a guest has reported the content, the guest's name and supplied email address are shown, and clicking this allows you to send an email to them. The reason for the report is now shown.

For each user report, you can change the submission reason, and this change is logged in the moderator comments to create an audit trail.

You can now mark the report as Complete or Rejected, which will trigger an email for all those who have reported this piece of content. You can also send one of the notification templates to the content author to update them on why their content has been moderated.

This email to each person who reported the content contains the date, content title, and reason for reporting, along with the pre-configured message for the report outcome. In this case, the report was flagged as valid, and the message to the person who reported it confirmed the outcome.

Putting it together
These changes help automate notifying both the author of the content and the person who reported the content on the outcome.

Let's look at an example flow to understand how these new tools help the workflow.

In this example, User A (Author) creates some content, and User B (Reporter) decides to report this content, choosing "Offensive" as the reason for the report.

The moderation team picks up the report, examines the reported content, and decides that the report is valid, so they mark the report as complete and choose to use a notification template to tell the content author (User A) that their content has been removed. As the report has been flagged as complete, the person who reported the content (User B) receives an email telling them the report has been upheld and action has been taken.

We hope these changes improve your experience with the report center. Let us know what you think below.