What’s actually the best response if a user flags a post that’s not doing anything wrong, but just informational?
We get a lot of these where someone flags a post with “Something Else” and notates “maybe this should be in this category…”
Since flags can affect trust level, I wasn’t sure how destructive this is. If I agree with the flag it increments the poster’s flag count. If I disagree it gives the responder an “unhelpful flag” note. “Ignore” basically seems to mulligan it, but Discourse reminds us later that we haven’t dealt with the flag.
Is there a best practice to result this and not have the flag count toward either member? Can I remove a flag without digging into the database or code somehow?
Does an “unhelpful flag” count toward a user’s trust level? Say if they get five of them does it knock them out of TL_3?
The best thing is to agree but keep the post. IIRC only spam and inappropriate flags count towards TL3. And besides if a user keeps posting the wrong category they probably shouldn’t have the ability to change the category of all topics
In this case it’s a well-intentioned new user getting flagged benevolently by a TL3 and it involved moving a post from a public topic into a private one. Which I assume the TL3 could have done themselves, but the new user wasn’t in the private group the topic belonged in so the situation required Staff intervention.
That becomes a bit harder to decide. On the forum Im a mod on these situations don’t (and basically cant) happen without some other rule violation (like being off topic) so I never handled this. But I would still agree with the flag since it was helpful but also keep the post like I said before. And the worse thing is that you keep an eye on them for the next 100 days (or what ever the TL3 period is on your forum) and manually promote if they meet all other requirements.
ignore as in “don’t do anything” or clicking the actual ignore button? On the NaNoWriMo forums we hit ignore and we don’t get reminded about them later. In fact I’ve never once had Discourse prompt me to deal with a flag where a staff user has clicked the ignore button on the flag.
Interesting. I meant Ignore as in “click the button.” We luckily have a small and well-behaved community so we’re not moderating constantly, and the one time I clicked ignore I assumed it meant “don’t worry about this flag” but I swear I got a reminder notification about three days later saying I had unsolved flags to deal with and it redirected me to that one. So I had assumed “Ignore” meant “deal with this later.”
Time to drag out my punching bag test user and try that out…
By private does this mean a pm/dm or simply a private category? If it is a Topic a TL3 or TL4 might be able to move the topic to another more private category. However if it needs the post to be moved to a pm/dm.
I have found you need to move the single post and a reply(if one present) to a new category. Then make the topic personal message and invite the user there wanting to discuss things with. I usually leave a brief message if they posted info that should be private ie posting one’s email address.