The discussion revolves around the idea of allowing users to discuss on top of a flag in Discourse. trandatnh proposed this feature due to an increase in low-quality or misflagged posts in their community. They suggested the ability to reply to a flag and discuss with the reporter to understand the reason behind the flag, as well as the option to correct the original flag type.
sam suggested using private messages to discuss flag issues, but trandatnh found this approach impractical due to the frequency of misflagged posts in their community.
codinghorror recommended starting a public meta topic to educate users on the appropriate use of spam flags, providing hypothetical examples to clarify the distinction between spam and other flag reasons. trandatnh appreciated this suggestion, acknowledging that software alone cannot solve education issues, but public conversations can.
I have been using Discourse for almost 2 years, it works great to me so far. Many thanks to the development team
Recently we have more and more replies that are low quality or bad/hateful/inappropriate. I have encouraged the members to flag whenever they think a post/reply isn’t fit to our forum.
However, it turned out that many members flagged it wrongly, for example a topic should be flagged as inappropriate but they flagged it as spam.
Should we have the ability to reply on top of the flag and then discuss with the reporter to understand the reason why he or she flagged the topic in the first place?
And even better if we have the ability to correct the original flag type. For example change the flag from spam to inappropriate. However, this feature should be on another topic.
Hmm, can’t you just click on the avatar and start a PM with the user, I know it is not ideal cause the text “this is about X flag” is not auto filled in, but the action:
“Let’s take a break and talk about all your really bad flags”
It’s not true in my case, I feel like half of the flags are wrong. Most of of the posts flagged as spam are actually inappropriate/off-topic posts.
Since spam flags are treated very seriously by Discourse, I can’t agree with those flags but have to defer or disagree it. It leads to another problem, my members will find that I actually don’t care of their flags but I can’t tell them why I disagree or defer it in an easy way.
I would start a meta topic on your community about appropriate use of spam flags. It should be a public topic with examples (hypothetical examples, not real ones) of what is spam and what is not. You could also cover other flag reasons.
Software cannot solve an education issue… but public conversations can.
