Encourage readers to report issues with correspondence

[RichardTaylor]

The "Report this request" option is now hidden under "Actions".

We might want to make it clearer that we want reports of issues such as misuse of the service to send personal correspondence to be made.

There have been a number of cases of third-party users expressing concerns about requests/responses in annotations rather than reporting them to the admin team.

Why are we currently apparently more concerned about copyright breaches, than issues relating to potential defamation and personal data, given the linked statement "Are you the owner of any commercial copyright on this page?" is presented on each request page?

Caution - urging more reporting could result in more work for administrators, however there are some misuses of the service which really should be drawn to the attention of administrators and acted on.

More specific version of this ticket:

• #5640

Related to the issue of seeking reports of misuse:

• #3542

[garethrees]

The "Report this request" option is now hidden under "Actions".

But we do have report buttons in the footer of each piece of correspondence.

Why are we currently apparently more concerned about copyright breaches, than issues relating to potential defamation and personal data, given the linked statement "Are you the owner of any commercial copyright on this page?" is presented on each request page?

I don't know the history of this. There's always been this comment in the code:

https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/3d3a388931a3721e02945d038ec0db2e26665108/app/views/request/_sidebar.html.erb#L40-L47

Related commits:

• Added in https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/commit/05a422d87dc49859014be1a5a2036caa77c16961
• Made small https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/commit/f4899f475a24a6cee3bd7736c57cf2aaf608b672
• Added comment https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/commit/385c87f89f840ef2f469a852c8513dd33f0d20d9

[RichardTaylor]

A more prominent report this request button could be a good place to note, and link to the house rules.

We've had something along these lines before, pointing to the help pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120604233323/http://whatdotheyknow.com/request/air_quality_liveability_perfoman

Related to this comment - also on greater prominence for the house rules

• https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/pull/892
• #6564
• #4706

[garethrees]

We've had something along these lines before, pointing to the help pages:

We made a call to give this less prominence in https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/3269.

I don't think we want our emphasis in the UI to be on "negative" actions. I think if we wanted to bring it back we'd want to come up with something that took significantly less space than the previous version.

There have been a number of cases of third-party users expressing concerns about requests/responses in annotations rather than reporting them to the admin team.

We could add the above element on the new annotation form to fix this specific issue?

[RichardTaylor]

We could add the above element on the new annotation form to fix this specific issue?

Some kind of prompt to contact the admin team with concerns / errors etc. rather than make an annotation would be good. Perhaps just a text link to the contact form.

~"If you think the WhatDoTheyKnow admin team needs be alerted to an issue please contact us. "

~"If you think the WhatDoTheyKnow admin team needs be alerted to an issue please report this request to us. "

~"Annotations will be posted publicly and are not sent to Ministry of Silly Walks or the WhatDoTheyKnow team."

[garethrees]

Yep, that's pretty much what I was thinking – also good to note that the annotations aren't sent to us or the body.

[sallytay]

Just a note that is was feedback from a user that "There's no simple way on the site to bring these matters to Admin's attention, is there? My annotation was an attempt to do that, but clearly went unnoticed." This was in relation to reporting that an email address for an authority was wrong = perhaps something that we could add into any improvements that we make

[RichardTaylor]

While I think we need this encouragement to be within the workflow of reading and acting on a response / error message, we could add to our advice on making responsible requests:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/help/requesting#responsible

and expand that to include how to be a responsible user of WhatDoTheyKnow - which includes promptly informing the admin team of problems.

[RichardTaylor]

While this ticket is focused on third parties other than the requester we do also have an issue of requesters not reporting matters we'd really like them to, such as data protection breaches.