That part is now fixed
The “add close date support to polls” item just got bumped to the top of my TODO list 
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That was unexpected. I’m glad another issue was discovered and fixed (quickly too) here. But now that that’s finished, the main problem still stands.
Yes, closing it would prevent the issue of it being flagged down, but the threads serve another purpose other than being a spot to cast votes on something. Users post their opinions and ideas on the subject within that thread, and a Staff member responds, instead of flooding the forums with a dozen or more topics pertaining to the exact same subject (This is not an exaggeration). This also lets users conveniently see the posts that the multiple staff responded to within the thread via the User Card. Locking the thread from the start would be inconvenient for both sides.
You could say “Simply appointing more staff will solve most of this…”, which is true and would be the only choice if pretty much any other forum software was being used with a similar flagging system (Is there any?). But doing this for an International game forum with a very large user-base by appointing trusted moderators (@ About - Tree of Savior Forum) and having it modded around-the-clock, is difficult. This would also help similar future communities, but regardless of what solution is made, I’m happy as long as someone benefits from it.
(Thanks a ton for the Poll fix @zogstrip! )
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As mentioned upstream, if it is the same narrow bunch of folks, suspend the users that are using flags incorrectly. This should arguably be automated, e.g. if many flags from a particular user are “disagree”, eventually that user’s flags should stop working.
If it is a large diverse group of users doing the flagging, set the topic flag close thresholds much higher in your site settings. That’s the immediate resolution.
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Ugh, now I have to worry about several of the flags I’ve disagreed with because I simply edited the user’s post to remove the offending remark and sent the user a PM, and didn’t want to hit Agree because it would hide and auto-PM the user and I didn’t choose defer.
sigh
With that said, hopefully staff would be immune to having their flags disabled? (should such a feature come about)
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You definitely should not disagree with flags unless you mean disagree, as in “this was flagged incorrectly”. Defer in every case unless you actually disagree…
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Plan to now! 
lol
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Unless things have changed recently (because I know we’re on an older version), when you “Agree” with a flag, it gives you two options: “Agree and hide post” or simply “Agree”. Using “Agree” does not send any message to the member.
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You should listen to @technobear, she speaks truth! Maybe one day, if you keep studying hard, you’ll learn how to use all the features of Discourse properly @cpradio 
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Or I can learn to play it smart and not try and think after a day out traveling (then maybe I’ll think about it correctly later on) – doesn’t help my prior usage of Disagree though, which I’m fairly certain I’ve done
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Hello all, I’m new here, but I come from a very active new discourse community, I’m an ordinary user in that community, and today I got my first post flagged and auto hidden so I came here to seek answers, and I understand the reason why this happened (3 users is a very small number relatively)
our community is https://macdiscussions.udacity.com (which is a part of this initiative https://ae.udacity.com/one-million-arab-coders/en) and it’s about 17 days old (it was started on 23 January).
Here’s a screenshot from the about page showing statistics of the community (it’s in Arabic so RTL):
The word “ألف” means “Thousand”.
statistics since the foundation (only about 15 days):
- threads count: 30.8k
- posts (comments?): 463k
- members: 41.7k
- likes: 603k
My threads that were hidden (2 threads) are 2 of the most active threads in the community with the first having 200 likes and hundreds of replies.
I didn’t finish reading all of your discussion, however as a previous Facebook user and a citizen of one of the most heated areas in the world (the middle east) I’ve seen some real Flagging Wars and what I learned is that the more beneficial something is, the harder it should be to hide it.
So what about a 5th suggestion: have a factor contributing to the threshold of flags:
- Leader post (+20 flags needed)
- Post with X number of likes (threshold + x/10 flags needed).
I’ll continue this discussion with members of our community staff, to see what they can do, especially that the members who reported my post are new newbie members in the community, and one of them was a spammer who got his account suspended before because of spamming (whom I contributed previously in the suspension of his account).
Thank you for the great Discourse!
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Personally, I think I would rather have the “unhelpful flags” feature further developed, but that’s me. I guess a type of “vested immunity” could work too.
AFAIK abuse of the flag feature is rare and usually handled manually not algorithmically but if it is easy enough. to code up it could be time to.
The mods should probably increase all of the flag thresholds by a factor of 2 or 3. Especially important is the “auto-close thread with X unhandled flags” threshold - that can be really disruptive.
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@eviltrout recently added a feature that makes staff posts immune to flags. It’s behind a site setting.
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