Another FA member PM’d me asking how to report off topic postings as they didn’t know who to contact and had a good suggestion in his PM.
Would it be possible to put a “report post” button (I have seen this in other forums) or a direct link on each page such as report post at the top next to discussion FAQ so new members would have an easier time with assistance.
I think Mark does a good job of monitoring and censoring when needed. A little banter within a thread is to be expected and is not a detraction in my opinion. Just like a normal discussion drifts a litlle, so too will these threads. When it gets out of hand, Mark deals with it. I don’t think we need a rat button, before that I would rather see an ignore user button. JMHO
Mark, or whoever it may be, also does a great job cleaning up spam quickly.
Well done to the whole FA team.
I agree with this. I see nothing wrong with a topic drifting away. In many cases, they postings for a given topic drifts in and out of the original posting. And in just about all cases (the Banter thread being the exception), topics die somewhere along the line.
If a person notices a topic drifting then the solution is for that person to stop reading that topic. The solution is not to have a tattle tale button.
The primary reason for this me posting this thread is what Phantomjet posted. Some of y’all may have missed it thanks to FA doing some serious housekeeping this morning.
I don’t see anything wrong with giving users some empowerment of having a direct link to assistance for the forums myself.
If anybody is that worried about being ratted on, maybe they should step away from the keyboard anyway and think before posting.
I still don’t see any reason for a tattle tale button. As mentioned, the staff does a good job of cleaning up.
I can see abuse of a tattle tale button. Somebody may post something that someone else disagrees with, even though it is on topic. The person presses the button. The staff then has to waste their time checking it out.
It (the forum and its posters) ain’t broke so there’s no reason to fix it.
For you it’s not broke. For new users it is…
New users shouldn’t have to contact another non administrative FA member for assistance on getting assistance on a problem about another FA member that apparently you are not aware of.
That stuff should remain between the administrators and the FA member.
As an Admin and Moderator at several other Forums I can tell you that the “Report this post” button is one of the most abused features we have, to the point that we frequently discuss turning it off.
Besides, there’s a perfectly good “Contact” button right there:
http://fc07.deviantart.com/fs31/f/2008/213/9/6/962f89ee8bb41de122c05bc00e900f7b.jpg
Me being one? 
Agree, but even with the ignore button in my experiences, it terribly fragments a thread AND **if **your ignored person is quoted by another person that is not ignored, that defeats the purpose of the ignore button.
James,
I thought of flightaware.com/about/contact/ if this is what you are talking about.
If this is the case it should be updated to include issues about the discussion forums. It only leads you here and newbies don’t know the staff members to click the pm button from their profile.
The member that contacted me has been here for quite some time and while not the regular you and I are, if they didn’t know who to contact but me, that probably is even more frustrating then a newer person.
All in all, we do police ourselves well, and while not a chronic problem, having a link for assistance privately really isn’t that unreasonable request even if the report post wasn’t adopted.
No, Allen, I look forward to seeing your posts. There are only a few I would ignore, and none of them a regulars. Just those speech posters and sports fan board jagoffs for me. I use the word rat because it’s how I grew up. It was not directed at anyone.
I must have missed what happened to spur this(feel free to PM the details 
). I am puzzled though why a new user would contact you for advice or council or whatever regarding off topic posts. That would be better addressed to a staff member I would think. I believe we all have had one or two posts removed, so be it.
Keep up the good work FA Staff.
I would hazard a guess that you and I see messages from folks because, besides having the ability to give the appearance that we’re rational, we have valid email links in our profiles. 
I know I’ve fielded more than a few emails from folks about the tracking site as well photos, flight planning, etc., etc. 
I tend to just forward the messages on to the suitable authority with a note to the OP that he or she has the wrong number.
Of course, perhaps our hosts don’t want the peanut gallery to have the ability to easily contact them!!! 
Yep, exactly what was done except the “referral” since the broom was well used in the housekeeping of uh some rather not so uh “clean” topics by the time I responded back to the messenger
Had I been sleeping when I should have been, I would have missed this myself and been wondering what the heck was the message about! 
With our monitoring of the forums, “FlightAware Staff” user ranks, and the contact page I don’t think we need to develop a fourth way for users to report issues.
And thanks for cleaning up that spammer garbage from last night Mark. http://forum.digital-digest.com/images/smilies/gif/thumbs_up.gif
WTF? I go to an airshow and spend part of the day on the lake (somewhat passed out…he he) and I miss something that is being this talked about?
James, Allen, Mark, et al, can I get a cliff notes version in a PM?
It was no biggie… One idiot was throwing out veiled threats acting as a moderator. Another spammed a bunch of threads with links to pron…
Ya know…just another day at FA.
So what airshow?
Got pics?..
The phony moderator might have been from MLB - self-appointed anti-stalking vigilante. Pretty lame, though – not convincing. Maybe he wasn’t expecting to be believed. The pron guy was probably just plain commercial enterprise – on a larger scale than I’ve seen so far.
The latter was disrupting my evening reading, so I decided to give FA staff some time to spruce things up. Thanks and kudos!
I might like to block a user from my display for one session, for cases like this weekend. But the blocked posts would probably still interfere with the usual filtering for “posts since last visit” (a fantastic feature that I use routinely). If that were malfunctioning, I don’t know if I’d still keep trying. So maybe the way it worked out this weekend is exactly what I prefer.
As for methods contacting staff, it needs to stand out, much more than it does now. Currently, there are dozen or so links in the headers, another dozen in the sidebar (not including drop-down menus). That’s a lot of widgets if you’re new here. You have to read patiently to pick out the one Contact button and the correct FAQ (did y’all know there are two?). And like Allen pointed out, the Contact page doesn’t even mention Discussions, nor offer any choice for it.
The Contact button in the sidebar is OK, but I’d suggest making more copies around the page (in the header and footer, for example) and making them visually very different from the other plain-text links (like red). On the Discussions pages, the Contact links should point directly to the Discussions point of contact. It would be OK to interpose a page of guidelines before getting to the actual contact machinery.
I’m surprised I had not got any PM’s only because I had called out the eyre of the Yankeesfan…IMHO I just ign. idiots…or TRY to sometimes I like to pick back it is a fun sick past time I have
Certainly there’s two, there’s the Discussions FAQ having to do with the Discussions Forum and there’s a separate page of Questions/Answers pertaining to flight tracking. It would be very confusing IMHO if the two were merged.
