I’m not sure if this is a bug or the lack of my understanding of “hidden”.
I am an anonymous user, I visit a topic that has a hidden post, because it was flagged by the community and I see: “This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.” with a link to “View hidden content”. Clicking the link allows me to see the original content.
I can PM anyone who may want a link since it isn’t on a “officially live” site yet.
I’m not stating there is one, I’m just confirming the behavior is correct. It was my understanding that was the design, but someone questioned it, and I couldn’t answer them fully.
We added click to view hidden content so people could have confidence that items were not being flagged and hidden inappropriately by the community. And if they feel posts are being hidden inappropriately, they can open a meta topic citing the hidden post content and making a case that it should not have been hidden.
I agree with it for a slightly different reason. If the community is the one hiding, there shouldn’t be a problem letting them reveal it too (if just to see what was said). Plus it permits them to quickly identify stuff they acted on.
So I actually like the way it works from a community aspect.
Okay, so this is a decent argument by a few of our staff (consolidated the different points together):
Apparently, this is now the expected behaviour, which has changed since we did our moderation testing back in April/May.
Our moderation guidelines were built on the premise that hidden posts were actually hidden, and I wonder if we need to amend them in the light of this? Many of the members who make problem posts only post once and never return. Their posts could therefore remain indefinitely, freely available for all to view - even non-logged-in visitors, I’ve discovered. And anybody can quote the “hidden” content and make it visible, which was an issue apparently fixed previously:
And the link to the post is freely available for anybody to share, although (as far as I can tell), the text doesn’t display if the link is pasted into another post.
Given that there is a limited timeframe in which members can edit “hidden” posts (I can’t remember what it is, but I think it’s a couple of days), I wonder if there’s now an argument for saying that hidden posts over a week old (or whatever) should be deleted? I realise it would be a nightmare to keep track and delete such posts systematically, but at least we could delete any we come across. That would also help prevent threads filling up with “This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.” messages, which decent members would have to scroll through, and which would, IMO, create a bad impression.
These are really good points and I’d like to know how you’d expect us to handle these.
Honest question: Are your community members really so bad at following your standards and guidelines that you have pages of flagged/hidden posts that constantly need to be cleaned up?
Yes, in our current existing community, we get this a LOT. I don’t see an easy path to teaching our users to stop this behavior. We are going to be much harsher in our moderation once we’ve fully moved to Discourse, but it will take a while for these members to learn.
Plus a lot of the issues surround one time members. They literally, sign up, post “useless” info that is “on topic” and then never return.
@codinghorror, I love that idea. I think it would work great.
[quote=“BhaelOchon, post:9, topic:19212”]
Honest question: Are your community members really so bad at following your standards and guidelines that you have pages of flagged/hidden posts that constantly need to be cleaned up?
[/quote] Yes. The community is HUGE and I run a team of ~50 staff who do this kind of reporting and moderating. We hope Discourse will go some way to changing these behaviour patterns.
[quote=“codinghorror, post:10, topic:19212”]
Not a bad idea, we could automatically delete hidden posts if they stay hidden for extended periods of time, say 30 days?
[/quote] Yup, perfect.
Perhaps @cpradio should give it a shot, should be quite straight forward, just add a schedule that runs a query to find them and then deletes them as system.
