Make it easier to block and report for spam

[James Gifford]

Current workflow when you get twitter spam:

1. Sigh in disgust with spammer.
2. Click user, opening up a column, loading up tweets, using API requests.
3. Click block button.
4. Select "report as spam" option.
5. Click "OK".
6. Do the hoki poki until you get the extremely subtle, not very obvious "reported as spam" notice (see attached screenshot)
7. Close column, return to tweeting.

How it *could* work:

1. Receive spam, sigh in disgust.
2. Right-click on spammers avatar.
3. Click "report for spam"
4. Spam is reported, presumably cooked within a few hours.

So, it's not every obvious/easy to report spam. Given the large amount of twitter spam, might be worth considering making it easier to kill spam.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The first time I saw the "Block User" dialog, I thought: If the checkbox was replaced by a third button, that would save one click.

But James has an even better idea here -- don't bother with a dialog at all. The one modification I'd make is to use a visible menubutton, like twitter.com does, rather than a hidden right-click menu.

(Apparently icon-only menubuttons are unreasonably hard. If you need help, ask Didier Roche, who recently implemented one for OneConf.)

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

The AppDevWeek and other things got me behind schedule on bug triaging...

Wait, I'm little confused, James suggested right-clicking on the avatar (and that, if I understood correctly, would work on both tweets and users, and perhaps lists too).

Matthew, you are suggesting an always-visible button that pops up a menu with two options, simple blocking and spam reporting, right? Do you also want it to appear on tweets/lists? If so, where would it be placed?

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

By the way, I'm pending more on the always-visible because blocking/reporting is a request that requires waiting for a Twitter response, so I feel a throbber is necessary.

[James Gifford (jamesgifford)]

The issue with a visible menu button is that when it's visible, it takes
up screen real estate - most twitter clients that I've seen don't have
the "report for spam" button hidden as deeply as it is in Polly right
now, but then again, they don't have it in your face - and while I'd
like to get around the dialog, Twitter's API TOS dictates otherwise[1]
(1.b).

I'm just tossing ideas out there - we should be able to come up with a
better way of doing this then the way it is right now, the question is,
"What is that way?".

[1] https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms/2011-04-13

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

To be honest, I didn't even remember this part of the TOS. In fact, I don't present dialogs for following/unfollowing unless the user is protected (and therefore the action is more difficult to undo).

I, myself, don't consider the need of opening the user columns that much of a big deal, specially because I tend to look into the user's previous tweets (instead of opening the link he's sent me), to confirm he's a spammer.

So, without taking the column-opening into consideration (though I'm open for discussion on this one), the problem is mainly the icon not being clear enough. It should either portray more clearly the idea of reporting or at least the idea of containing multiple actions. Then I could turn it into a menu button as Matthew suggested (about the difficulty, I could simply pop a menu right under the button... wouldn't be visually integrated wrt colors but I don't think it's a problem)

[James Gifford (jamesgifford)]

Fair enough - just having the button more visible would be a big improvement.

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

I've been giving this subject some thought in the last days, and now I'm not sure if I should change it.

More specifically, I'm not sure if replacing the current dialog-with-checkbox with a menu is the best choice because blocking and reporting are destructive actions. I feel a dialog is necessary. But if I keep the dialog anyway, then using a menu button would decrease efficiency, not increase it.

I need to think this through. Suggestions welcome.

[James Gifford (jamesgifford)]

I've been thinking about this as well, and I've come to the conclusion
that maybe the smart (if I can call it that) thing to do would be to
make it a little more obvious that the block/report spam button is the
block/report spam button.

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

Icon suggestions are welcome. :)