[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by logank013

I thought about that too. That's part of why I thought of having a mod double checking the spam report. If it's spam, the mod removes it from the "trash folder" permanently. If it isn't spam and there are no problems, the mod reinstates it to it's original spot of posting.

With that said, I think the CD community for the most part won't report a post as spam when they are mad at someone to get their post removed. To make it harder for fake accounts to be created and to report someone they are mad at, this function could be only used by accounts with 50 posts or more.

It doesn't need to just be something most people won't abuse. It either needs to be not abuse-able at all, sufficiently hard enough to abuse that most people won't bother, or use of the feature needs to be restricted. It just takes one bad actor every once in awhile to temporarily hide a legitimate thread or two, and then it will take even more moderator work to restore it. Even if the majority of us would never do that, it would happen. Imgur had a similar feature, where if X people reported a post it would be automatically removed temporarily, and as soon as it was discovered it was heavily abused until it was disabled / tweaked.

I'm not a website builder but I'm trying to think of this from a "logical" perspective like I would when solving a Computer Science problem in Java.

These kind of perspectives get a lot harder when you add human behavior and psychology into the mix. It is an important lesson to learn early into a programming career, to constantly consider human-machine interactions and the unintended consequences of seemingly simple solutions. It's a lesson more engineers and software people need to learn, frankly.