Report Button

Yes

Are you sure? Couldn't it be handled by posting a comment, starting a discussion, emailing the person, or emailing the coordinator?

Perhaps it is an option which could be offered. It definitely wouldn't need to be used for all groups.

Another way it could be done is having a system with a button which requests the message be reviewed. Until it is reviewed it could automatically (immediately or after x requests) go into a moderation area.

My main concern would be for public/large groups which don't have a close cohesion. There will be occasions when groups members flame, slander, hurt, etc, other members, or other people. It would be remiss not to have an easy tool to enable members to report such situations so they can be dealt with promptly. For me this is an issue of safety for people using Loomio.

I would prefer such an option rather than feeling that public facing groups would need to have pre-moderation set up on them, which I feel is bad for participation and it inhibits free flowing conversations.

@matthewbartlett as to the other options you suggest they aren't friendly options as they take so much work compared to a click of a button.

Metafilter (online community of ~20k active users) gives these flag options:

fantastic post
double post
HTML/display error
offensive/sexism/racism
noise
derail
it breaks the guidelines
other

Clicking one of these notifies the moderators (~5 of them) and it is up to them to respond as they like. It's a really discrete way to get rid of offensive content without derailing a thread (there's a saying: 'flag and move on').

@richarddbartlett It was exactly that sort of thing I was thinking of, ..a very discreet, report button could be there along the lines of the like button which is already there.

The automated approach I suggested below I have never seen elsewhere but it could be an interesting approach as it empowers the community to take action rather than just leaving it to the group co-ordinators.

I should just add - I like the postive flag approach as well.

Positive flagging encourages good content (which is more interesting to me than discouraging bad content).

It would be interesting to see if we could emulate slashdot's filtering ideas without the UX nightmare they have created:

To explain what's going on there: posts are rated on a scale of -1 to 5, and tagged against 'insightful', 'interesting', 'informative', 'funny'. You can set the two slider positions to change how much content you see, e.g. if a post is rated 4 or above, I want to see it displayed fully, if it is rated between 2 and 4, I want to see an abbreviated version of it, and if it is 2 or under, I want to hide it from view.

It's a super complicated system (but highly effective for a population of super geeks), where comments from people with a good reputation are automatically ranked higher than comments from people with a bad or neutral reputation.

Somehow I think the multi-dimensional ranking system is going to be a bit overkill for most groups!

@richarddbartlett now that would be a fun approach! I can think of a fair few uses for it ...but you might have to change the whole concept of Loomio for it to be used extensively.....now I find it frightening thinking about how it could be used to exclude people from being involved in decisions!

I have always found in communities generally the proportion of content which needs to be removed is very small and I suspect that groups which use Loomio for the decision making it will be even less.