The report link is only to be used for reporting either spam or inappropriate posts. Please do not report spam unless it has gone unnoticed by a moderator for at least 24 hours, preferably more like 48. Please especially do not report spam which is obvious. Every report is added to a list which acts like a discussion topic, every time we check it each report is one more to go through and delete. Most spam reports are associated with topics or posts which are already deleted so this is just irritating, all the report does in this case is essentially spam up a moderator-only topic. We wouldn't tolerate it in a public topic so why should we have to put up with it in the report list?

In addition as happened in one case recently, no names, the report link is not to be used for general replies to topics or contacting the moderators directly.

Out of 8 reports I just cleared there were 5 spam reports which had already been dealt with, 1 report which seemed like it should have been a reply to the castaways topic, and 2 spambots. However unlike a discussion topic we have to manually mark each report as read, without the option to skip past them. This makes reports rather niggling.

In summary, please do report when necessary but do it responsibly. Reporting the MP3 spammers as spambots only wastes both our time and yours, as well as insulting our intelligence. If you can see it's spam then so can we, the issue is if the spam post is buried inside a genuine topic which we haven't been actively watching. That is when we need reports, and that's why you should wait for a while before reporting.