I just reported a spam post, and as is custom, after reporting it, I made a single post in the thread to say that I had done so. Except that I found I couldn’t: It told me that I could only post once every 60 seconds, and had to wait another 53 seconds. And this has happened a couple of other times over the past few days. Clearly, the report to the mods is being counted as a post, for purposes of the “1 post every 60 seconds” limit.
Except I don’t remember this ever being the case before. Is this new, as a result of some change made to the settings? Is it desirable behavior?
IIRC, if you report a post you have to wait to 60 seconds to make a forum post, however, you can make a regular forum post and then report a post right away.
In the past what I’ve done is posted ‘reported’ and then reported the post. That gets around the 60 second thing. Since we’re in ATMB, maybe you should test it out. Make a post and then report a post (make sure to type something in the report, that’s probably what’s triggering the timer). It should go through.
A few minutes later, report something (probably apologizing in the report), then post something right away, that should give you the 60 second warning.
There were a few changes made last year. It used to be that post reports generated e-mails that went to the mods of that forum. We also discovered that PM reports didn’t actually go anywhere useful. We still receive e-mails for post reports, but now post reports and PM reports both generate posts in a hidden mod only forum.
There has always been flood control on the post reports. The change with respect to the post timer is likely related to the new posts being generated for reports. It’s all basically for flood control, though.
It’s all working the way it was designed to work, and the changes allow all of the moderators here to get a better picture of what’s going on all around the SDMB.
I wonder, if one makes a report before the minute elapses, does that prevent the mod-forum post from being generated? Let me test that here: I’ll report my post as soon as I make it.
OK, that settles it, then. It works perfectly fine, on all scores, to make the post first and then the report, and I’ll just have to settle for cringing over the tense when I say “reported”.
I just tried it and if the tense really bothers you, you can post “Gonna report”, report the post and then come back and edit your post to say “reported” and no flood control will eff you up.