I actually really prefer the approach where you don’t need mods to step in. That’s the best part of Discourse’s approach to flagging. But the concern about getting notified about edits is spot on. However, it should be the flaggers who flagged in the first place getting the notification IMO, not the mods getting notified:
I disagree about that. That pushes against the learn-by-editing approach. The goal is not just that one post is fixed, the goal is that people learn to avoid the bad patterns overall, and if it takes some people more than one edit to learn what’s acceptable, fine.
I have a question regarding the other person in the exchange viz… the person the flagged post was addressed to.
Let’s say that X posts a reply to Mr Nice. A moderator / the community notices that X has made a hateful post, flags it and the post is hidden. We know that X will get a email as described above, we know the post will be hidden on the forum… that’s all described above. But what about Mr Nice? Will Mr Nice still receive the hateful post as an email, (if our forum is set to send emails about new posts) despite the post having been hidden? What if the post was flagged and hidden in a timeframe less than the timeframe set for email notification of replies?
Unfortunately, no – but when they visit the site they will see that the post has been hidden through flagging, or that a staff member has opted to remove the post.
Sorry if I was not clear. The flagging would have to happen very rapidly to prevent an email notification from being sent (and remember that Discourse won’t mail you if any device has pinged the website recently to avoid double notifications). It just depends how fast the flags come in.