Reminder: We're a friendly Forum. Calling other people trolls isn't friendly

Pollycat

suki1964 wrote: »

When 4 or 5 people have reported the same AE?

Sure I might be wrong, someone else might be wrong, but all of us???

end of the day the forum team aren't forum users. They don't see the patterns, they cant spot the AEs which most of us old-timers do within the opening line of a post

When I said it was a difficult situation for a forum moderator, that was based on the fact that I wouldn't know that 4 or 5 people had reported the same AE, only that I might have reported a poster, thread or post.

onomatopoeia99

Lambyr wrote: »

Some people also still have dynamic IP addresses and not static ones

An increasing number with IPv4 address exhaustion. And then there's carrier grade NAT where the WAN side address of a connection is from an RFC1918 address space, which some mobile networks are already giving out so all their users appear to be connecting from the same IPv4 address, which is effectively the WAN side of the ISP's router.

Roll on universal IPv6 when NAT will (should) be a thing of the past as every grain of sand can have billions of routeable addresses and even then still we'll never run out (though some will still want NAT, because they think it's a firewall. It's a firewall in the same way that RAID is a backup).

MSE could implement a forwards only hash of the IP address, though with only 32 bits of data the salt had better be good, and it still will fall over with VPNs and the like as you say.

p.s. hi Lambyr :hello:

Former_MSE_Andrea

eschaton wrote: »

What?

Use the function that isn't working?

Or have you fixed the problem?

Hi, yes, it's fixed now.

Please do report. It's the only way we know. Thank you!

Former_MSE_Andrea

Thank you for all your replies.

We're reading all of them and do understand your frustration.

There are some misunderstandings we'd like to clear up.

"MSE leaves trolls to continue posting"

We don't have the resource to check posts are correct or incorrect. My team aren't benefits experts and we can't ask them to be.

New forum members go through the same four-step infraction process as other forum members. If posts are reported when they happen and found to break our rules this four step process (the final step being permanent removal of posting privileges) may happen over the course of a week. If not, it may take months.

Our process aims to be fair to all forum members. We would never ban a forum member for the first inappropriate post we receive a report of and would never ban a forum member simply because several other forum members say they're a troll.

The perfect outcome for us is that a forum member reads our first message, takes it on board, reads our rules and posts appropriately from then on.

"We report but nothing's done about it"

This is something we regularly see mentioned in forum reports to us.

Just to be absolutely clear:

• We read every forum report we receive. If someone's reported a post but not received our auto-reply then we haven't received the report.
  
• We rarely reply to reports, unless we need further information from you.
  
• If we feel action needs taking we follow our four-step infraction process (if you're not sure what that is it's in the Forum Rules that all forum members confirm they have read when they join).
  
• We don't tell forum members who report posts what action we've taken.

I completely understand just receiving an auto reply from us and no further updates isn't the best user experience and it's no surprise you feel nothing's being done.

It's a part of the user experience I'd like to improve but it means a big change in our reporting process and it's not something we can easily change at the moment. However, we have strategy consultants in at the moment and it will be fed into the strategy.

To avoid further mentions of particular forum users or their threads I'm going to close this thread now.

Thank you all for your feedback, as always, it's very much appreciated.

Now let's get back to saving people money :T:T