DevCentral Issues: Thread/Post Flagging & Mobile Device

Checking in with my main guy on this. 🙂

Hey whisperer, Thanks for raising these issues! I'm going to reply to a couple of your points, and my teammate LiefZimmerman will reply to the frustrating error issues you are experiencing. 

"Checking private messages, there is an option unde the gears for 'report as inappropriate'. However, I dont see a similar option for either a thread or a reply - currently we have a few threads about Fox news propaganda and muscle relaxantats."

Users can report spam and abuse by first clicking on the top right dropdown on post or reply, and then clicking "Report Inappropriate Content" and it'll send the post to a queue we manage daily M-F. We then double-check things, ban the spammer, and nuke their spam. 

Did I blank out every name of the channel and provider? Yes, yes I did. No reward for spammers. 

"I wanted to use a label 'devcentral' on this post, but was unable to. Additionally, I didnt see any specific forum section for posting these particular concerns. So if it does exist, moderators please move my thread appropriately."

Labels are reserved for the label options listed under the field, but you can use Message Tags to add something like a "DevCentral" tag (or an "AWAF" tag, "BIG-IP" tag, etc).

We generally expect threads like this to show up in the Suggestions Tab or for issues to get sent directly to the team, but it is totally OK that you originally posted in the Technical Forum.  I'll move this thread to the Suggestions tab once this reply is posted. 🙂

Finally, thank you for speaking up! While we do our best to anticipate things, the only way we find out about a lot of issues is when users like you point them out to us. We really do appreciate members who want to make DevCentral a better place. 

Leslie_HubertusAppreciate it! In terms to the 'inappropriate content', it wasnt intuitive to click on the down symbol on the first post in the thread. Instead, I was looking at the triple stacked dots. Now I know 😉 Suggestions is now intuitive once explained, and will certainly use that for issues with the forum moving forward. Thank you.

whisperer if it makes you feel any better, I still get confused as to whether I should click the down arrow dropdown or the three dots. I'll make that a post to clarify it for the community. 🙂 

Thanks whisperer 
The invalid HTML issue is endemic. I wasn't aware that it happened everytime on Mobile - I'll need to escalate that use-case and see if I can establish root cause.

Too many posts is a configurable designed for limiting the impact of bad-actors. I think it can be elevated to a point where it won't impact you as much - I believe we already have that elevation set up for our MVPs but I'll take a look at whether it makes sense to apply that rule to very high - but Non-MVP ranks as well. Good idea.

Labels - this is sortof a long story but the quick answer is Labels are going to merge with Tags in our next major release (sometime between Aug 2023 and Jan 2024). At that time you will be able to add ad-hoc tags at time of post creation (right now it is only after the fact).

There will also be pre-defined / required sets of tags and DevCentral will probably not be one of them. The predefined set is really more for BIG categories (DevOps, Networking...maybe a new small set of functional categories like Deployment, Installation, Securing, etc) - if we see a good fit we may use a PreSet Tag = Community? but so far I don't see the need for that unless we open up a very specific meta-forum around DevCentral.

thanks for your thoughts and opinions - keep em coming. Tell me why you agree/disagree.
It all matters and helps us decide what to do next (or not).

In a roundabout way I've come across this older suggestion and would like to re-visit the OG one.
The Gear icon on threads and the ellipses on private messages both have "Report..." options.

I believe this is at least more consistent and easier to use.

Labels and Tags did merge as of last Jan 25th. So far, I've not had the time to dig in to what extent I am going to update them to be more useful overall. Some of that work make come along with some other enhancements I'm beginning to plan for the next few months. (cough) Tags specifically for Products are not something i'm keen to enforce (anyone can add any tag they want to any post - and there is type-ahead to help reduce dupes) because Product names change pretty fast sometimes and then other times they have contextual specificity that eludes the higher-level categorization work. BUT, I am working with our internal documentation teams, who ARE working hard to improve consistency and flexibility with manuals and meta-data (e.g., tags) on those documents. I will, at least partially, ride their coat-tails on this I think. They need it, I want it - they are probably going to think more critically than I will on how to implement a good meta-data-taxonomy.

Invalid HTML issues, unfortunately, got even worse IMO. They still happen for the same reasons, perhaps less frequently, but the error handling is worse. I have an open bug with my vendor to improve error-handling - no eta yet.

whisperer - do you think all of ^that^ means I might close this suggestion? If you have further specific or direct thoughts on how to improve the Tagging feature; perhaps a new Tag-specific suggestion would fit the bill?

The new way to report an individual comment:

and for an original post

Looks good! But I must say the website doesnt work nice anymore in Brave. Not necessarily the DevCentral platform itself but https://account.f5.com/ just provides the classic 'something went wrong error'. Good times. So you are correct, lots of gremlins when it comes to mobile versus desktop and of course the myriad versions of web browsers ;)

Closing as Delivered simply because of the REPORT feature update.

Labels/Tags - a new suggestion if anyone wants it.

I'm working on that something went wrong error sortof in the background. It is encountered occasionally, in circumstances I think is related to stale sessions. Since Brave is so focused on cookie management (ahem...blocking them) I imagine whatever fall-back scenario we are encountering in other intermittent cases may happen more reliably using Brave.

Ignoring the fact that Brave isn't supported - I will pass that along to my partners managing account.f5 as a test case and maybe it'll lead to a config change in the link handoff that reduces or resolves that problem entirely. (no promises) 😇

Thanks!