Not a rant, but it deals with administration of the boards, so here it is.
In this thread I messed up the coding for links. Yes I know preview is my friend. Back off.
So I was left to the mercy of thread readers to report the coding problem for a fix to clean it up a bit. Here’s what I’d like to know. Why can’t we report a post we made?
I understand why a poster can’t go back and self-edit a post. It’s obvious in how this board works. What I’d like to know is why I can’t report my own post if there’s a fix requested? Sure, I could e-mail a mod for a fix request, but who do I e-mail? I could pick one from the listed mods, but what if they’re not around for a few days? Do I send mails to all of them? Seemswrong somehow to flood everyone’s inboxes for such a minor issue.
I’m assuming (and this is where I always go wrong) that reporting a post goes into a central location that any mod can respond to. Kind of a clearinghouse versus individual requests.
So what is the deal with not being able to report your own post? It’s still up to the mods whether or not any change is made to the post.
There are two ways you can report your own post. You can report an adjacent post by another poster and indicate in your report that you are actually reporting your own post above (or below, as the case may be) or you can copy and paste the Report Post URL into your browser address bar:
…and replace xxxxxxx with your post’s PostID, then hit <enter>. To get your post’s PostID, you can hover your cursor over the post number in the upper right corner and look at the Status Bar. The first way is easier.
I assume that’s just how the software works out of the box. Since it lets people edit their posts by default, the assumption probaby was that no one would need to report their own post, they could just fix whatever it was by themselves. Shortsighted, I think, but not something the SDMB can fix itself.
When a post gets reported, does it go in that poster’s “permanent record”? (Yes, I’m serious. I clearly remember a mod saying that they keep a record of all the bad things people do.) I mean, even if the mods decide the post is okay, does it still get recorded that SOMEONE thought it needed to be reported? If so, this isn’t a good idea, although it hardly matters, I suppose.
That’s not what was said. Warnings go on “record”. There’s no reason to put reported posts on record, when it might simply be a report of “Wrong forum, oops”.
The previous incarnation of the board software did allow users to report their own posts; not that I’m complaining, just a data point, is all. I suspect it’s a configurable thing where the default setting has changed from one version to the next.