We are allowed to report on all posts but our own. Unfortunetly I sometimes would like to report my own messages when I make some sort of egregious error that I need a mod to correct. One time, while I left the browser open and had a couple of drunken friends over, an idiot friend of my posted a bunch of stupid crap that I did not find out about untill later, I ended up “reporting” the post just below mine to get the attention of the mods. In fact, probably due to the great community we have here, I have needed to report on my own posts more often than I have those of others.
The staff has said a few times that reporting the post directly above/below your post is what you should do, and also to make sure it’s clear when you submit the reason for reporting. This leads me to beleive that it’s not a decision made by the staff, but a vB quirk that doesn’t allow us to report our own posts.
Okay, after digging around a bit, it turns out it’s a feature, not a bug. But you can get around it with a relatively trivial modification detailed here.
I understand that the admin is leery of mucking with the code behind the scenes but this is only one like of a text file and all you need to do to revert the change is to make a backup file and switch it back with the original. IMHO, this is a fairly annoying feature and it’s come up often enough that something should be done about it.