Report Center.
It does lack/have its drawbacks in certain cases, but it's in my opinion a major improvement over the thread report system.
Pros:
- Alert Counter for reports
- Easy to assign/perform tasks via one click
- Easy to resolve/reject with optional alert to user who reported
- Quickly able to check status of reports and the comment feature is quite useful
Cons:
- No preview of "user reputation" (i.e: past warnings, current warning counts etc) of the reported content user/direct report.
- No option to directly edit/perform actions on reported content, have to "go to content" always.
- No option to split existing reports/merge reports.
- Not being able to perform actions on multiple reports via selection (unlike threads/posts etc).
- Not being able to tag or alert other moderators/staff team via the comments.
- Even though a report is assigned, still shows up as a red counter for all other moderators.
The last point above in cons is the one that has annoyed us the most, and I think is the biggest flaw in the report center.
When a report is assigned, other moderators should not be disturbed by the assigned report. But XenForo doesn't handle it that way, as far as I know its session based and once a session ends the moderator again views the "report counter" in red (even for a assigned report) causing confusion and making the moderator check the report center multiple times for an ongoing report/report being handled by another member.
We have some cases where a report is assigned and put on hold/to be reviewed by a senior moderator or administrator. But it causes confusion to ALL the other moderators as they end up seeing a red counter and presuming that its a new report. Yes, when we hover over it we get to learn the last update time and once you view the report the counter is no more red, but this happens very so often and practically makes waste of assigning a report, because it ends up disturbing other moderators more than helping.
I was planning of switching to thread based reports just due to the annoyance our team was facing due to this issue, however after weighing pros & cons and the thought of having to change our whole moderation flow we preferred to stick with the report center.
It surely needs improvement, its a positive change from existing report systems (or what existed before) but just look at what IPB4 has done with its report center. I'm not saying XF should copy, but improvement is much desperately required. I cannot begin to imagine how big forums handle via the report center as it already lacks heavily for a growing board like ours.