In another discourse forum community im from, users are bypassing flags by editing their posts. If it’s a reply they just delete then undelete, or just change 1 character then add it back. I am admin for another discourse forum and i would not like this behavior seeing it is never used to actually change the post to comply with guidelines. I can’t find a setting
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around the issue of users editing their posts to bypass flags on Discourse forums. incapaz is concerned about this behavior and is looking for a way to disable the “unflag on edit” feature. However, osioke suggests that this is a community culture issue and recommends increasing the spam threshold instead.
incapaz expresses frustration with users editing their posts solely to unhide them without making any changes. riking confirms that unhiding on edit does clear the flags, giving the user a chance to fix their post.
Heather_Dudley shares her experience from a large forum, stating that this issue is not as significant as it seems. She believes that the problem can be dealt with through policy and moderation rather than relying on tools.
This seems like a community culture issue and not necessarily something the community tool (Discourse) can resolve.
That said, you could increase the spam threshold for these communities? See /admin/site_settings/category/spam
I guess that will do, was a little mad when I flagged a topic and the OP edited their post just for the sake of unhiding it without changing a thing so sorry if I was sounding a big angry. Eventually the topic got taken down though. Side question: does unhiding on edit also clear the flags? We don’t have anyone yet my forum is still being set up and i cant experiment at the moment.
This is intended behavior, to give the user a chance to fix their post. It sounds like they threw this chance away, and it was eventually correctly removed.
This really isn’t as big an issue as it seems. When people do this on my (very large) forum they learn pretty quickly that just brings the mod team down on them harder. The next flag, it gets fully removed (deleted) and if they continue to abuse the function, they’re removed from the community.
This is an issue dealt with through policy and moderation, not tools. The vast majority of users use the function properly.