I have recently set up a Discourse Forum for my company. We want to comply with the requirement in the EU Digital Service Act’s Article 16 (emphasis mine):
Providers of hosting services shall put mechanisms in place to allow any individual or entity to notify them of the presence on their service of specific items of information that the individual or entity considers to be illegal content. Those mechanisms shall be easy to access and user-friendly, and shall allow for the submission of notices exclusively by electronic means.
I have already set the flag post allowed groups setting to include everyone, but in order to fully comply, I would also want to make the flag button visible to signed out users. It is acceptable to me if they were prompted to create an account to flag, even better would be allowing them to flag without an account.
Is there a setting I have missed with which I can accomplish this? If not, what would be an easy way to add such a button myself, e.g. using a custom theme component?
Though in theory you can likely use CSS to override the flag button to show for anonymous visitors via a custom theme component. I think the sign up module might pop up as an account is required to use the flagging feature. Iirc the post/reply buttons show and cause the sign up module to display.
Another thought that maybe possible would be to unhide/show flag button to anonymous visitors to alternatively to open an email to the ‘contact us email’ with a pop up to include link to post and reason for contact?
Discourse already fulfills all demands. And that act is mainly for gatekeepers, and any Discourse forum in the world isn’t in that position.
The second thing is what is wanted, and that is a totally different thing that is needed or must be done. And with that want-sector, you will get some help for sure.
Well either way it is often better to exceed a standard vs just meeting a minimum. I have often promoted this as a certified Health & Safety Rep. Better to be a leader than a follower.
That is quite German approach, but still, this is not matter of national ruling, but EU level. And then everything I said stays. But if you ask from dutch you will get different answer that from Finland, or Bryssel.
Welcome to the community, @reknih! I moved your topic into here because it’s the same conversation.
This is a feature request and a good idea. We don’t have any plans right now to implement it so the answer for the moment is to provide instructions yourself on how to report illegal content. There are a bunch of ways to do this - the easiest probably is to just start a topic and link to it from the navigation. You can also add information to your site description, or edit site texts for e.g. “contact us” on the /about page.
This is an item I will follow up on, and see if there is appetite to make this simple change.
This is a good idea, but it’s not hard to imagine that sites would become inundated with flags unless this is implemented carefully. We have to think like an evil person - how would they abuse this, and what can we do to mitigate the abuse?
How about something like this for v1:
sites opt in via new site setting to enable flagging by non-logged in users
when enabled, flag is shown on posts to non-logged in user
when flag is selected by non-logged in user, the same popup is shown, except with prompt to log in first or to submit without logging in
if user chooses to not log in, they can select a flag and write an explanation as usual, and optionally provide an email address in case they want followup
before submission, they have to verify they are human and reachable by providing an email address that is sent a confirmation link they click on before the report is submitted
report is added to the review queue just like a flag by logged in user
The v0 could at step 4 provide instructions to send report by email to the site contact email address, with a mailto link with some prefilled information including the topic title and URL, reason and explanation.
