The discussion addresses a persistent issue in the Discobot tutorial where users mistakenly flag posts using “something else” instead of “inappropriate,” triggering unnecessary modmail. Although a prior fix prevented the tutorial from getting stuck, mod messages were still generated. mbauman notes this commonly trips up users and proposes tweaking Discobot’s tutorial text to clarify the correct flagging action. After experimenting with revised wording on their site, mbauman reports a significant drop in errors—from 4 out of 18 users to 0 out of 17—suggesting the small textual change (emphasizing “inappropriate” and explaining consequences of “something else”) is effective. codinghorror endorses adopting the change, and justin confirms a pull request has been merged to implement the updated tutorial text across Discourse. The fix aims to reduce accidental modmail while preserving tutorial functionality and user education.
This is effectively a followup to Discobot tutorial gets stuck if 'something else' flag type is selected. While the tutorial no longer gets stuck, it still generates a message to the moderators. Obviously this is something that many folks trip up on during the tutorial — it’s happened four times in the last 10 days on our site — and the discussions here show folks had been getting stuck prior to the fix. The prompt says to flag it as inappropriate — and while I read that as “use the inappropriate reason,” it’s written in a natural way that I can see missing inappropriate as an important keyword to match.
You already hide/dismiss the flag, couldn’t you also hide/prevent sending the mod message (especially now that discobot responds appropriately)? I also just changed discobot’s text a bit as an experiment on our site to see if a slightly different wording helps lower the volume.
It’s still early for our relatively small site but this is looking promising. In the month prior to changing this, 18 folks did that tutorial step and 4 flagged it wrong. In the month+ since 17 have done that step and 0 got it wrong. The new text adds a few more details about why you might flag a post but I’m guessing it’s the very small change to the final sentence that’s doing most of the work:
We like our discussions friendly, and we need your help to keep things civilized. If you see a problem, please flag to privately let the author, or our helpful staff, know about it. There are many reasons you might want to flag a post ranging from an innocuous thread-splitting suggestion to a clear-cut standards violation. If you select “something else,” you’ll start a private message discussion chain with the moderators in which you can ask further questions.
I wrote something nasty here
Go ahead and flag this post and select inappropriate as the reason!
I wrote something nasty here
and select inappropriate as the reason!