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I reported a code of conduct violation on Sunday evening (Sydney time) via the web site, as I wanted to check how the website works for non-users. It’s now Tuesday morning, and I haven’t received an email from Stack Exchange. Yes, I checked my spam filters.

People reporting a CoC violation ought to receive an acknowledgement in some form or another of their complaint, otherwise the person may suspect that Stack Exchange will try to pretend the CoC report never happened. Ideally, it’d happen immediately after the report was made, and indicate what steps Stack Exchange will take in investigating the report.

It’d also be nice if people are also informed once the matter has been investigated, so that people don’t have to resort to constantly visiting the offending post to see if it’s been dealt with, but that’s a separate issue.

The post in question is the same one as in More needs to be done against anti-semitic posts on Stack Exchange, which has since been deleted.

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  • Still no email reply. Yes, I checked my spam filters.
    – Andrew Grimm
    Commented Oct 16, 2019 at 11:17

1 Answer 1

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We previously had an auto-responder for ticket submissions that would indicate we received it. However, it was turned off because it was being used by spammers and trolls to bypass some of our existing spam filters (send a message, see if you get auto-responder, tweak message until you do get auto-responder) and flood our inboxes with worthless junk. Until we can investigate better ways of preventing our inbox from just becoming a heap of junk we have to dig through to find real issues, we won't be using it again.

We understand the inherent value in having this auto-response. It has value to us too, and we wish we could keep it on. But it's very draining to login every morning to 4 pages of tickets where only half a page of them are legitimate requests, and the mental health of our support team is more important in the immediate term.

We do have some ideas for how to solve the problem. You may have noticed that the contact form got a CAPTCHA added to it recently, and there are some other tweaks we can do to help cut down on the abuse. We hope to get the auto-response turned back on someday.

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  • When was this auto-responder disabled?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Oct 14, 2019 at 21:54
  • @Sonic It was on and off for several weeks starting sometime in August, and then fully disable a couple weeks ago.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Oct 14, 2019 at 21:55
  • As I'm about to edit this into the changelog post, I'd like to have an exact date when this was completely disabled.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Oct 14, 2019 at 21:56
  • @Sonic Sorry I don't have an exact date. There is no changelog for when that rule was updated in our support system to be able to look up exact dates.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Oct 14, 2019 at 21:57
  • Okay, no problem...it would be nice to know, however, whether this took place in September or October (so it can be filed into the correct month section).
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Oct 14, 2019 at 21:59
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    @Sonic Actually, it probably was Sep 26 - the same day the captcha was added to the contact form ( I do have a date for that change ;) ).
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Oct 14, 2019 at 22:12
  • Does foxbug (and I think one of your directors knows what it is) not have a function to deal with this?
    – Ian Ringrose
    Commented Oct 15, 2019 at 1:11
  • @Ian We use Freshdesk for our support system, not Fogbugz. And the way that we insert tickets into the support system, no there isn't a great way of dealing with it unfortunately. We'll likely be forced to change how we get tickets from the form into the system, which requires a lot of developer time to do. It's one of the features we miss the most from our days with ZenDesk, which did have a fairly decent spam filter to get rid of a good portion of it.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Oct 15, 2019 at 1:15
  • @animuson was the auto responder turned back on by now?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Dec 9, 2019 at 8:05
  • I'm getting automated responses to all of mine. First one was 2019-12-08. Mark as [status-completed] ?
    – sourcejedi
    Commented Feb 1, 2020 at 15:34

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