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?
