I am a moderator on a discourse forum. And I make mistakes!
The problem stems from the presentation of tools for a post being at the end of a post (A) (Good) and tools for the entire thread being at the end of the thread (B) (Leads to mistakes).
When moderating the most recent post in the thread, it is too easy to mistakenly use tools for the thread (B) instead of tools for the post (A). For example, deleting a thread and banning the originator, instead of deleting the last spammy post and deleting the spammer. I am not the only user/moderator making this mistake.
There are lots of things that could be said about taking care over which button is clicked. Nevertheless, some repositioning of the thread related tools would remove the danger completely. If thread tools (B) were moved to above the top of the thread, they would clearly refer to the thread and would not be anywhere near the post related tools (A). The cause of mistakes would be removed.
These exist at the bottom as duplicates of what’s on the first post, because someone may want to flag the entire topic when the first post is out of view… so we don’t need to move them to the first post in the topic because they’re already there.
Having that in mind, I can see how flagging would be used by mistake here… I wonder how useful the flag button at the bottom of a topic is. If the original post was 10 or even 100 posts up the stream… is it appropriate to be flagging when it’s out of view rather than taking the action directly on the problematic post? Sometimes it gets used as a general “I think this topic is getting off track” button, but should we be pushing people to flag more specific posts instead?
One thing that you can change on your own site that may help in the short term is removing the flag option from the post menu hidden items site setting. This will cause flagging to always appear outside of the post … menu, so maybe someone will be more likely to reach for the flag on the post level rather than misusing the topic-level flag?
