Technology1 min ago
reporting
38 Answers
Having just read about TCL's problems with being banned I wondered if you could add a new category of "Too Chatty" onto the report questions and answers list.
It is obvious that some users are reporting for this reason. At the moment the ABank cannot see which ones are being reported because they are chatty. With this extra choice the ABank could at least see how much of a problem chat is to the rest of the users.
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I suggested this in another thread earlier.
I report anything that leads the site away from its intended use. If I find a post that is chatty I always report it.
Yes I could ignore it, but why should I have to sift through chat to read proper questions as this site was set up for.
Until the Site Rules change I for one will continue to report anything that I consider chat. If you don't like it just ignore it or go to a chat site.
Artful I reported netibizas post as being abusive. Obviously other users had already done the same.
hung6 I read this suggestion in another thread earlier and thought it a good idea. It wasn't posted by you though it was posted by betweenjobs.
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/AB-Suggestions/Question113326.html
Hung I think it's more to do with annoyance about chat rather than bother...I mean...how much effort does it take to 'not click a button'. If a question is chatty then it will ultimately mean that once in every 100 uses of AB you will need to click onto the next page instead of finding what you want on that screen.
ALSO. I don't think it really works to say 'This is not a chat site, if you want to chat, go elsewhere'. The rules kind of state this, to discourage rampant chat, but I'm sure that those who run the AB have realized by now: people that are giving up their time to answer, purely altruistically, others concerns, many of them deep and personal, will have a necessary human urge to create some kind of bond with these people. The site does not thus turn into one big massive chat room...just the odd jovial post here and there, mostly in AB suggestions, and when elsewhere it just is mostly confined to one thread. Take 'photographs' for example. It got very chatty, but was confined to one thread, and among the chat I learned a lot about picposting trickery from IndieSwinger*.
Alllllso....people learn things much much much better when they are learned 'incidentally', eg amidst chat, when compared to 'raw answers'.
Allllso, and most importantly....LIFE IS TOO SHORT.
as I understand it, the reporting functions were added at AB users' request.
Obviously some chat is useful, notably yesterday's photography thread - plenty of hard information was imparted with it. But some is just chat. The internet is full of places to chat and there's no need for AB to become one. In fact, people who have posted queries must be mighty teed off when they get constant emails saying they have answers, only to find it's users who have hijacked the thread to discuss their marrows.
I don't report chat myself, but I see no reason why others shouldn't (including my own posts), as long as stuff that is actually helpful but chattily expressed isn't barred. It isn't enough to say if you don't like don't look at it: the whole point of AB is that you should be able to get information quickly without wading through gossip. Go ahead, Hung6.
