radisnooker5This has disturbed me for a long time. When regular members report things, they need evidence, right? Why not do the same with mods? When they are deleting submissions, they should provide valid evidence, as well as further explanation and elaboration. For example, if a texture pack had textures that were used from someone else's without authorization, then they should provide evidence via comparison screenshots, or other methods. This will further reduce confusion, rather than plain stating, "You used textures that weren't yours". This will be beneficial by allowing mods to think twice before they might potentially remove a submission that never conflicted with the rules in the first place.
I hope you took the time to read my suggestion, thank you.

We do need evidence. Deletions are not done for no reason. Usually when a report is valid, we delete based on the report itself. When it's something as simple as using somebody elses textures, why would we need to say more than "you cannot use other peoples textures"? It should be clear to the user that they then broke the rules. They shouldn't have to message us and ask us to show them what exactly they stole, which we then have to dig through again to show them, and then they're like "oh right". It's just a time waster.

The person who posted the pack should have enough knowledge of their own pack to know why the rule we provide to them was broken. If they have to ask for further explanation, either they clearly didn't put enough effort into it that they don't even realize what textures they ended up putting into their pack that weren't theirs, or there is a legitimate misunderstanding that may need to be resolved, but to be honest the latter rarely happens out of the # of reports that are handled daily.

It's also worth noting that we used canned responses in order to help our balance of report # versus time spent per report. The responses will be going through a huge overhaul since the new rule system would allow us to link directly to the rule rather than having to reiterate it in the message. In most cases the message makes it clear to the poster (assuming that it is not a misdelete) why it was removed and no further explanation is required; this is maybe 80% of cases. Approximately 15% of cases are users that have not read the rules, do not understand the rules, or simply refuse to believe simple concepts of ownership (ie, I downloaded the skin from another site therefore it is now mine) and basic copyright law. They are not fun to deal with and can waste hours of a moderators' time (and possibly others, depending on how many they drag into it) with back and forth nonsense. The other 5% are legitimate misunderstandings, false reportings and misdeletes that get resolved shortly afterwards.

tl;dr if you want to avoid issues, read the rules before posting. Moderators are taught and enforced to download and actually compare or otherwise have good experience & good reason to believe that something is stolen. They are taught that if they are not willing to respond to the person if they receive a message asking about a removal that they should not remove it to begin with.

-P

I hope you realize how much the mods have to do. They don't have time to hunt down submissions to compare to yours. If they remove one of your submissions, reread through the rules to see if what you did violated anything (chances are you already know why it was removed) and if not, pm them. It's a very simple process

Not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all.