wednesday said:
If you have loyal members who report spam anyway...i dont see the need for it? Bar from complete nosiness.
It doesnt show very much respect for your members.
Well said, and I agree, and that is
exactly why I
only use it as a means of following up on a member's report. I am not going to jump the gun and
assume that they are right and immediately punish the other person without said proof, because that wouldn't be fair. Misunderstandings are inevitable, and there have been times where one members' actions have been misconstrued as advertising, when, in all actuality, they weren't and were only trying to help..
Such as one incident where one member said in a topic, that their web hosting wasn't so great even though they paid a lot of money for it, and another member, who I'll call "J," who happened to own his own hosting company, offered to host that person for free, and sent a link to their site via pm to avoid being accused of advertising (since they weren't sure if it was, but didn't want to take any chances..) and they didn't want to interrupt the discussion at hand with possible questions from the other person about their company.
When the other person got J's message, they appeared to have misinterpreted it, and then forwarded a copy of the pm to me. Because J has offered to host me before, especially after some MAJOR downtime due to DDOS attacks, and I had a feeling that his actions may have been misinterpreted, I decided to follow up, and saw the pm J sent, and found that not only were his actions miscontrued, but that the other member, had left out the part of the message where J said that they saw the other member's post, sympathized with them and was willing to help them out by hosting them for free, since that happened to be the very reason why they started their own company.
I have no idea why the other member left that part out of J's message, but I can only assume that it was a mistake, especially since, after they received my reply, they apologized for the trouble and said that they weren't sure about it since they had read the rules and saw the part that said that members are encouraged to report any abusive or rule-breaking pms they receive. So, after seeing the pm for myself, I replied back to the other member and explained that "J" was only being generous because he had offered to host me as well, and was not trying to advertise his site. I told him that they may have misunderstood J's intentions, to which, they replied with an apology.
Now, imagine if I
had jumped the gun, and
assumed that J was intentionally breaking the rules, and I warned him without any other proof. Things from that point on, would have been quite uncomfortable as I will have punished someone for being generous. I look to avoid issues like this whenever possible, and so, this is why when they do report, and they tell me who they got it from, that I look for that person's name in the log, see the proof for myself, and if it turned out to be intentional, then I can confront that person with said proof. I am pretty sure that some have advertised, and the the members on the receiving end hadn't reported it, and without a report, then I have no choice but to assume that it doesn't happen because I would not feel right about using that ability without good reason.
I am just happy that I haven't had to go this route in more than a year.
😎
