You've seen something bad in the Fediverse. Now you want to let someone know about it. Start here.

The first thing you answer is what you are reporting:

1. It is spam
2. It violates server rules
3. It's something else

Ok, so you want to report spam. First off, take a look at this definition of spam. It will be helpful. Then answer these questions.

In this case there is nothing to do. We are not the “Pre-crime” division from that film Minority Report. If the account's very existence violates a rule, jump down to It violates server rules and focus on that. Zero posts cannot be a violation of the spam policy, so we won't take action.

Stop please do not report this to the moderators. Please use the Mastodon features for filtering and blocking unwanted content.

Look at the Internet Society's definition of spam. One post is not spam. Look at the account's number of followers. Is it single digits? That means this post went to our public timeline and a handful of other accounts. One post does not violate the spam rule (but it could violate other rules).

Stop please do not report this to the moderators. Please use the Mastodon features for filtering and blocking unwanted content. Or wait until the account has actually violated the spam rule to report them.

Ok, maybe we're talking about spam. Keep going to question 1.B.

1. The posts have nothing to do with Information Security
2. The posts are identical or nearly identical
3. The posts tag lots of unrelated users or try to get their attention
4. The posts are asking people to do something for the poster e.g., give money, boost the post, buy a thing
5. The posts are more than one per day
6. The poster is not creating discussion and/or not responding to replies on the posts
7. The posts have lots of unrelated hashtags

If 2 or more of those criteria are true, please report and attach offending posts. We don't promise that we take action on a few posts that have a few of these things in common. The more posts there are, and the more of these attributes are true, the more likely we are to conclude it is spam and take action.

If it's not many posts and only 1 of these criteria are true, Stop. Please do not report this to the moderators. Please use the Mastodon features for filtering and blocking unwanted content.

Our rules only apply on our server. So the first thing we have to figure out is which people involved are users on infosec.exchange.

If everyone involved in this situation is on an instance other than infosec.exchange, we not only can't do much, we probably won't do much. If it is content that does not target our users and doesn't originate from our users, we encourage you to use the Mastodon features for filtering and blocking unwanted content. If you think it somehow rises to the point that we should take a server-wide action, make sure you explain that in your report.

Please Report: We protect our users. To the best of our ability they will be kept safe here.

Note: If it is a direct message, moderators can't see DMs ¹⁾. You must send screenshots.

Please report We take the rules seriously and we will take action when rules are violated.

Note: If it is a direct message, send us the screenshots.

Whatever it is, be sure to give us lots of context. What is it? What action do you think we should take? Is there any history we should know? Attach posts if you can.

If you want to see this decision tree in a flow-chart, here it is.