The discussion revolves around a concern regarding private message (PM) flags on Discourse. nildarar suggests that revealing the identity of the reporter in a PM flag should be hidden, citing scenarios like a school student reporting a threat to principals.
nildarar emphasizes the importance of keeping the reporter’s identity secret, even if it seems like a specific scenario. However, codinghorror finds it a narrow concern and doesn’t see why it’s a problem, given the specific conditions required.
codinghorror further points out that, out of thousands of customers and eight years working on the project, this is the first report of this issue, and it’s obvious that if only two people are in a PM and a message gets flagged, the other person must have flagged it.
riking chimes in, agreeing with nildarar and also criticizing the hidden flag threshold system, advocating for more predictability. However, nildarar later acknowledges that they might be too strict about this and leaves it to future discussions to make good decisions.
In a two-person private message, suppose one of the parties flagged the other person. Managers see the flag and, in addition to checking, hide the flagged post.
At this time, a message will be sent to the other party stating that “your post has been hidden by the community report” along with a direct link to the post. In my opinion, revealing the identity of the reporter is not a good thing and it is better to always be hidden.
Consider that discourse may be used in a school and a student may want to report a threat to principals …
It would be great if we could change the relevant system message for private messages or prevent it from being sent.
I’d like to second this and the past complaints that the hidden-number, opaque flag threshold system is not good for predictability.
Smaller forums deserve the predictability of person count guarantees for automated actions, and just in general avoiding a single user flag from having any visible effect except in exceptional circumstances (the old “TL3 spam flagging TL0” rule).
The “flag sensitivity” settings which incorporate a user’s past flag agree score means that a single user with a good flag history can trigger the “this post was hidden by the community” display with an off-topic/inappropriate flag, if your score is high enough. That fact that it also works in PMs is just a particularly bad special case.
This seems very specific, but it can happen a lot in large forums. I think the identity of the reporter should not be revealed under any circumstances, this is very important.
And yet, out of thousands of customers, and eight years working on this project.. this is literally the first report of this “problem” I’ve ever read.
I think it’s obvious to the point of being ridiculous to even talk about, that if only two people are in a PM, and one of the messages gets flagged, obviously the other person flagged it.
Waving your hands around and saying “oh this should somehow be a big secret, when two people are in a PM and a flag mysteriously appears” is just.. an incredible waste of everyone’s time.