I just reported a thread in GQ for duplicate title/content. I wanted to add a post to the thread to say so in case someone else thought to report, and was given the timeout message. Why is a post report counted against the time between posts? Shouldn’t it be more along the lines of a PM? 
It’s dumb. But posting doesn’t time out reporting so I post first and then report.
If you want to be meticulously correct, you could:
(1) Post “about to report”
(2) Report the post
(3) Correct your post to “reported”.
But the effort seems hardly worth while.
First post ‘‘reported’’,then report it.
If the tenses bother you, then you could also type “reporting”. But it’s not a big deal.
And the reason why it counts as a post is that it actually is. Whenever anyone makes a report, there’s a post that shows up in a special forum viewable only to moderators, made by that person, which contains the text of the report (this is one way we keep a record of reports). Now, they obviously set it up so these special posts are an exception one way, in that you can still make reports when you’ve just made some other post, and they probably could have made them so they were an exception the other way, too, but, well, they didn’t.
Thanks, Chronos. That makes sense.