Use of Flags

[Lilly]

@TonyG

My point in this exercise is to shed light on a situation that has been with us for as long as online forums have existed (for me that goes back to late 1970s). It’s a hole in this tooling that we can all fall into, given similar circumstances, as admin, moderator, commenting member, or helpful community member flagging what we believe to be undesirable content.

so you are blaming the tooling for what exactly? what is the “hole”? I’ve read all your posts in this topic and I am really struggling to see what your point to all this is, other than that you are unhappy with the moderation on another forum that happens to use Discourse.

@TonyG

I’m not asking for any specific changes, just surfacing the situation and wondering if anyone thinks this is worth some initiative(s) to remedy some of the possible undesirable outcomes described here.

And I especially hope this can help other admins like myself to recognize how our tooling allows these situations to manifest. We can improve our own Discourse (and other) forums with better monitoring of notifications (um, turning them on), delegating, documenting policy and preferences, etc.

what undesirable outcomes? that you had a post flagged that you didn’t agree with? how is it the “tooling” that is at fault here?

is this what you are asking?

@TonyG

Do we have an option to suspend the right of individuals to flag content, or to help users to appeal such a flag?

if you have over-zealous flaggers, perhaps you can create a custom group for such users then omit them from this setting (and maybe lock them to TL-1), or trust level rate limits, etc. flags start pms with moderators so you can appeal there.

if flagging is an issue on the forum, then perhaps the moderation policy (hopefully the forum has one) and terms of use need reviewing and updating?