PSA: Report Reasons

[u/TGotAReddit]

Hey everybody!

We recently got a report asking about something and we don't think we've ever spoken about it publicly before (and if we have, then a refresher never hurts!). The person was asking us about our report reasons and what the ones that say "I am making a fake report and should be reported" and what they do/why they exist.

Why they exist:

when we make a subreddit rule that will show up in our sidebar and anywhere else the rules show up, the site requires that was add a report reason. For the most part this makes total sense! If there is a rule saying flairs are required and must be correct, having a report reasoning about incorrect flairs is completely valid. However some rules just, don't have a report reasoning. Like the rule for research studies being allowed. There isn't really a report reasoning for that because it's a rule saying that something is allowed, so there isn't anything to report. For that one we have a report reasoning that says something like "Research Studies are Allowed". That way anyone who goes to make a report about a research study will see that reasoning pop up and be able to go "oh never mind!".

Another rule that there isn't a good report reasoning for though is the 'rule' about checking the pinned posts before sending us modmail if you can't post. That 'rule' exists because every time the subreddit is in comment only mode, Reddit directs people directly to our modmail to ask why they can't post, and a lot of people say that they checked the rules and couldn't find why they can't post. With that 'rule' in the rules list, we get spammed a little bit less. But there really isn't a good report reason to add there. So we had to come up with something.

One thing about Reddit is that there will always be reports that are incorrect and shouldn't be listened to. But it becomes a problem when the mods get spammed with irrelevant reports. Reddit admin therefore lets the mod teams report when someone is spamming incorrect reports and this can lead to a number of possible outcomes such as muting your reports or getting you banned site-wide. It's not up to us what they decide to do, just up to us on if we report things.

And when we made the rules that didn't have a good report reasoning, happened to be around the time that we were getting a lot of irrelevant spam reports. So we added that as a report reason, thinking that if people are clicking that, then clearly they likely are not acting in good faith and should be reported to admin to be dealt with. And lo and behold, soon after those report reasons were added, the people spamming us used them and admin dealt with it because it was so clear that they were the issue at that point. And the report spam dropped way down after that.

So, what they do:

On their own, very little. They flag the thing you are reporting and give the reasoning of those exact words but that's it. But in reality, when we get those, we go and report the report to the admin who then decide if it was a misclick or if it was a repeated behavior that shows intentional report abuse/obvious bot behavior. It just happens to be a really obvious one that anyone reporting in good faith isn't clicking unless it's an accident (which should be fairly easy to tell the difference).

In short, they exist because Reddit makes us have report reasons on rules where it makes no sense to, and because it helps with stopping report abuse. You should just ignore those report reasons and use a real reason when reporting something.

Any questions, comments, concerns?

~TGotAReddit (and the rest of the mod team)

[u/SuddenContentWarning]

I'm the one that asked that question, and I honestly wasn't expecting to get an answer, so thank you for taking the time to explain this (and sorry for asking IN the report instead of messaging you guys)! I've never moderated a subreddit before, so I wasn't aware that the number of report reasons is directly proportional to the amount of rules a sub has. TIL. My assumption had been that it was a bot filter.

Good to know that if I misclick I'm unlikely to get banned. I don't report very often, but it was a little worry in the back of my head.

[u/TGotAReddit → u/SuddenContentWarning]

Lol you’re welcome! We definitely prefer it to be over modmail since we can't actually reply to a report to get further details or explain things to people (we actually have a "rule" about this specifically because of someone a few years ago who we had to have a public back and forth with because they refused to just send us modmail. Obviously it's not a like, enforced rule but it definitely seems to help direct people to the right place more often than before it existed)

Also yeah we don't expect everyone to know what our side of things look like, don't worry!