Report button: Ability to ‘flag’ a reported post with suspicious add links to disable them.

[Twailaith]

Recently ran into a typical spam post with highly suspicious links off-site that's from either a bot or a compromised account.

Multiple posters have reported it, but until a mod actually responds, the odds are someone will still click the links by accident and end up with malware on their computer.

Proposed solution: ability to checkbox a post for 'malicious content' when reporting, specifically for containing links to malware or similar spam content off-site.

When a post is reported with this check tag activated, it will automatically kill any links contained within that post until a moderator has had time to investigate.

The purpose of this is to avoid the spreading of malware or Trojan data through spam links, and allow board members to help police malicious activity on the board.

I realise that this proposed feature could potentially be misused, and recommend harsher penalties for misuse of it compared to regular miss-reporting.

Additionally, the original poster for threads should be exempt from being targeted by this function.

I am aware that it's not currently a widespread problem on the site, but with the improvements in AI as well as an significantincrease of it on other platforms such as discord, I foresee that this could possibly become a recurring issue in the future.

Hence this proposal.

 

[Canadian Leprechaun]

I'm fairly sure anything that would give non-staff users the power to modify a different user's post is a non starter. Maybe the checkbox to flag suspicious links brings the report to the top of the que so whoever's on duty checks it quickly to prevent harm? That also makes it easier to punish misuse, as opposed to killing the link which could fall into a gray area of over cautious and outright stupidity.

 

[Steelgames]

Instead of disabling link, it should make a warning pop-up before the link that say something like: This link has been flagged as malicious and could potentially infect your device, are you sure you wish to continue?

That way even if people report it for no reason, it won't be a problem since the author could just ask the mod for the warning to be taken down. To prevent abuse, there could be a requirement like having an account that is more than 3-6 month old with permanent ban as a sanction if abused.