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  1. MusicBrainz Server
  2. MBS-8208

Add a way to report a user to an admin

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    • Icon: Improvement Improvement
    • Resolution: Fixed
    • Icon: Normal Normal
    • 2015-11-30
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      Splitting this off from MBS-6541 because that ticket is really vague, broad and unactionable.

      I think there should be a way for users to report other users to an admin to handle cases which require someone with extra privileges. Right now, there's no obvious way to do it - you have to know what is acceptable to report, who to contact and what to say to them. The result is, I suspect, that people often don't report things when they probably should.

      There are a number of things where an admin needs to be involved:

      • Deleting accounts, e.g. spammers
      • Removing email addresses, e.g. for unresponsive editors
      • Looking at email addresses, e.g. for investigating suspected sockpuppets
      • Removing auto-editor privileges, although actually removing the privileges would be rather rare, having a way to report repeated breaches of the CoC would be useful.

      I'm not sure what the best way to implement this would be, but one very basic idea would be to reuse the email this editor functionality:

      • Set up an email address which forwards any email sent to it to the people who are admins, like we do for various other @mb.org addresses.
      • Create a special editor which has that email address in their profile
      • Add a "report this user" link which goes to the "send email" page for that editor.

      There are some obvious improvements that could be made to that idea:

      • Display a special form, with a dropdown for the reason (spam, unresponsive editor, code of conduct breach, etc) which (along with the username) would become the subject of the email. The message field would stay the same. The page content could include more information about what is considered acceptable to report and what information should be included in the report. Displaying more than just the basic contact this editor page is probably necessary for the reporting to work well.
      • Determine the people to send emails to automatically instead of using an email alias thing. We already know which editors have admin privileges, so it could send the email to anyone with those privileges instead of us manually adding people to an alias thing.
      • Add some fancy web interface for managing reports instead of relying on emails. Possibly useful, although maybe we won't get enough reports for it to be worth the effort. Probably better to wait and see, given our chronic shortage of dev time.

            bitmap Michael Wiencek
            nikki nikki
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                Version Package
                2015-11-30