Are there problems with using flags to nominate posts for recognition?

I am currently implementing a custom badge system to recognize exceptional posts (not topics, but specific posts), while it’s great the mods can award this badge, I would also like the ability for users to nominate posts for a badge. My initial thought was to use the flag system and encourage the user to use ‘Something Else’ to notify the mods of a post that deserves a badge and then the mods decide if it should be awarded. But then I’m concerned that if a bunch of users flag a post it will be automatically hidden, which is obviously not what I want. So, a few questions:

  • Will a post be hidden if a bunch of users flag it with ‘Something Else’ or does this only apply to the other flagging options?
  • If so, where is the threshold for hide post sensitivity on low, med, high? I would hate to disable this all together, but that is the nuclear option.
  • Are there any other negatives with a post being flagged? The flags show up on the users profile to mods/admins, but are there any other problems with using the flagging this way?

Thanks!

3 Likes

G’day there, if the users are flagging the post as something else and lots of users do it it will not hide the post. If you just ignore the flag it shouldn’t effect the user that flagged it or the users post that got flagged.

5 Likes

You may want to check out the Retort Emoji Plugin. This may be what you’re looking for. There are 16 posts in this topic so it shouldn’t be too much to go back to the OP if desired. I linked to what I thought was the most relevant post. That discussion goes on from there. Hope this may help. :slightly_smiling_face:
There has got to be a way to have a scoring based on the civility of a post, rather than just popularity

4 Likes

I know this is an old one, but did you come up with a good system in the end @davidkingham?

1 Like

Unfortunately, no. We used the ‘Something else’ flag for a while and it sort of worked when we first announced it, but over time people stopped using it. The big problem here is that flagging is not an intuitive way to do this, there really needs to be a dedicated tool for this. Something like the awards you used to be able to give on Reddit would be ideal, but instead giving badges, or nominating for badges potentially.

1 Like

Ah. That’s a shame.

I’ve been tinkering with ones based on certain Reactions, which seems quite promising. So ‘x amount of :medal_sports:’ per post, or a certain Reaction given by members of a certain group, etc.

Ideally, you’d need the custom SQL badges enabled to fully automate it, but bulk granting from a regular explorer report could work as well.

2 Likes

6 posts were split to a new topic: Using Reactions to grant badges