I just don't get it. The flow of user interaction is completely bass ackwards. You have to go around to several different places to deal with it all. I think it's best demonstrated by example:
Let's say a spammer comes along, registers a new account, posts a spam topic, etc. Here's how I have to deal with it under IPB 2.3:
- Get a report PM
- Open the topic
- Copy the username to my clipboard
- Log into the ACP
- Find the user
- Delete any topics/posts they've made
- Delete the user (I choose to delete, rather than ban, but it's the same net effect)
- Delete the report PM
And now in IPB 3.0, the flow hasn't improved at all:
- Get a report email
- Check the report center and open the report
- Open the topic
- Copy the username to my clipboard
- Log into the ACP
- Find the user
- Mark then as spam
- Delete any topics/posts they've made
- Delete any PMs they've sent
- Delete the user (I choose to delete, rather than ban, but it's the same net effect)
- Handle the report
That's a lot of steps for something that happens every day or so. Here's what I'd like to see happen:
- Make the report center more feature-filled. I should be able to both get to the topic in question and also act upon it.
- I should be able to mark a user as spam, delete their topics and PMs, and delete/ban them in one fell swoop. One button to handle everything in one place. Simple as pie!
- Put those buttons, links, actions, etc in the topic itself, in the report center, and in the ACP. Let me take care of this stuff easily.
At it's core, I don't want to both have to log into another area of the site and perform similar actions in separate locations in the software. I had thought the report center was going to handle that, but it's really just a specific PM-handing system to replace what we had before. Boring! Let it actually do something. On smaller boards or ones that only get occasional spam, it's overkill to have a system just for managing reports. But if it actually adds functionality, the benefits come back to those kinds of customers.
Thoughts? Am I missing something incredibly obvious?