Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

On most other community based websites with forum posts or comments you will have a link that says 'report' which allows you to report comments without having to copy the link, go to the forums, then actively look for the appropriate thread to post the link on, making it much more convenient for users and (I assume, since I've never been a mod of anything myself) mods.

I don't know how much the implementation of this would fuck with the site's code, but I feel that it's an idea worth at least considering, and if doable will probably help everyone in the end.

As someone who frequently posts images here, I always get emails of comments from spambots, but I am not able to report them since I frequently am on my phone. Adding a report button will help at least with this since I can report spambots immediately as I see them without having to go through the trouble of finding the spambot thread

I think the issue is less coding and more worries about functionality. See, we have sort of a case study for how this would work – Suggest Edits, on entries. Some recent examples of this are:

"Just wondering if you have a way to get in contact with him?"
"any"
"[copypasta about how grandpa died from smoking and the person promised to never smoke and how they got cancer anyways from that page]"
"Can someone finish this please? :)"
"oy gevalt"

This isn't to say all or even most of these are like this. In fact, I made 3 edits to entries based off of the list of suggestions entry mods can access while gathering these up. But this is just to point out that if a little-used feature on a site is abused like this, how will report buttons on comments?

I already get PMs every now and then for comments that I just can't act on, even if I want to. Other mods get them too. These are just people who are aware of active moderators – the entire userbase will have access to the report button. So many reports, I can guarantee, will be a waste of time. And I can guarantee as a result of that, the mod team will be seen as useless or horrible – because we won't act on all these many junk reports that other people think are worthwhile. We'd even likely miss some valid reports, based on how the entry suggestions go – moderators in general don't read the entry suggestions page, as most of them aren't something worth doing something about. For example, one which just said that it was wrong, without actually providing any real correction.

So, to recap:

• It'll be abused
• It'll be ignored because of this
• Mods will be seen as junk because they aren't responding to all the many junk reports and also miss real ones

This idea would need serious polishing to actually work, based on what we have seen happen already.

Couldn't you just ban the people who abuse it?

Maybe instead of giving a description of why a comment is report-worthy, it could have a list of offenses to choose from instead? Like

[Harassing]
[Hate Speech]
[Sexually Explicit]
[Etc.]

Look at this comment. KYM comments are tiny. Like, extremely smol, and also involve huge quantities of neat whitespace with no lines in the way. This kind of design is probably one of the few things KYM arguably does right. I can understand your desire to have an easier method of reporting comments, but 1/3 of the clickable elements on your page shouldn't be report buttons. And given the nature of KnowYourMeme comment sections, I can easily imagine such a feature both being abused and causing much more conflict than resolution. Given the nature of comments and how quickly they can be scrolled through, I imagine there would be insane levels of repeat-reporting for obviously bad comments, which would overlap with the users who are already accustomed to PMing mods.

Also, all those "reports" would have to go somewhere, and that would mean either a new addition to the Admin Area section of the site (which nobody uses), or just spamming mod inboxes (which nobody uses except fucking Rivers ). As it stands right now, KYM comment moderation doesn't really exist. It is instead managed by specific comment removal requests by users being fulfilled by mods. No new features or changes to the site is going to change the fact that there isn't anybody to oversee it.

Consider hopping into the KYM official discord and giving the mods a shout there. I've never seen a time when at least one active moderator wasn't online.

And I can guarantee as a result of that, the mod team will be seen as useless or horrible

As if they weren't before <3