Just like with spam posts inappropriate posts should be hidden immediately if a moderator flags it.
If I flag a post as inappropriate, but don’t take further actions yet it’s because I think the post has no place in our forum, but want to discuss with the other moderators what actions should be taken (ask poster to rewrite post, delete post and send official warning or delete account immediately).
If the post stays visible until the other moderators are online and made up their minds people will respond to it and often resort to inappropriate language themselves. If worst comes to worst you may have to punish valuable, usually calm-headed users of your community to not be accused of favoritism.
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If you Flag as “Something else” and unlisted the topic it should give you some time to discuss with other moderators.
You could also delete the post, discuss, and then undelete it if deemed appropriate.
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Sure, that works if we are talking about a first post in a topic.
Yes, I guess that would be a viable workaround, but it kind of defeats the purpose of a flag.
Usually the offender gets notified when their post is flagged and they get the chance to edit their post and re-writing the offensive part to make the post reappear. They won’t have that chance if the post is deleted.
PS: Also deleting a flagged post resolves the flags…
I guess that leaves Flagging and Take Action?
That would take care of the “hiding” and give the member the opportunity to edit the post into something acceptable.
Does your forum have a restricted “moderator” category where Moderators can post “What should we do about FoulMouth’s post?” topics to discuss what should be done?
If I take action the flag is no longer active though.
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Right but the focus is “hide immediately”, as you stated. You’re free to start a staff topic discussing the post as well. If the focus is not “hide immediately” then flag and wait would work better.
What I want is to hide the post immediately (so people don’t get offended; to avoid a heated discussion that will result in many more inappropriate posts; to keep forum users from getting angry and improve the general climate in the forum and community) while keeping the flag active (some moderators regularly have 100+ open notifications, but open flags stand out over e.g. staff category discussions).
I don’t see the reason why spam posts should be treated any different than offensive posts when flagged by a moderator.
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Hi! Continuing on this discussion and trying to clarify what is intended behaviour here. We have moderators on our forum that have been using the flag to alert each other of an inappropriate post. After three moderators have all flagged that post it is hidden. This has worked very well for them. After updating Discourse this is no longer possible as a post gets hidden as soon as someone flags it. Has this been changed or are they using the function wrongly? It’s a good way of working for our moderators. Do we have to change our process or can this be accomplished with the current version of Discourse? We’re still on 2.2.0beta4. Thanx!
This was discussed above. Make sure the moderators are pressing Flag Post and not Take Action.
I know this works because I hold admin on some Discourse instances, and I will flag posts for the moderators to handle by pressing the Flag Post button.
Can there be a bug in this feature? All posts are hidden instantly if we do it this way.
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OK, it seems that only the “Something Else” alternative leaves the post unhidden even when pressing “Flag Post”. All other alternatives hide the post immediately.
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Hmm, you are right. Is this a regression @eviltrout?
Very unexpected for a non “take action” flag to hide and reach threshold immediately? But I just tried it and indeed it did… is this related to recent TL4 changes?
I changed my trust level to 3 and had the same problem. Something has regressed here,
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Thanks for taking a look at it. 
This change seems intentional to me:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/227a49bb328ef6a4be5f2893eb7c3a7e5897fccc
@vinothkannans didn’t link to a meta discussion but it seems like the commit intented for TL4+ users to hide posts automatically unless they were made by TL4.
@vinothkannans do you remember why this was done?
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Right but this is a bug. Should not apply to STAFF only TL4.
Staff have the two buttons to pick the behavior they want. This is being ignored now…
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It’s fixed now.
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If you’re giving TL4 the ability to instant-hide posts, why not give them the option as well and just show the two buttons?
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The way I understand, the difference is “I think this may be a problem” vs. “I have decided this is a problem”, where if enough think it “may be a problem” it then becomes hidden.
From my experience only rarely, if ever, do hidden posts get edited into being acceptable by the member that posted. So I doubt many would be upset if they discovered their post was wrongly hidden. Just the same, I think that group consensus is safer than solo judgement. Depending on how trusted the members offered the ability are of course.
And it depends on the problem type too. IMHO allowing spam to be hidden is more reasonable than hiding an off-topic.
TL4 is a manual promotion, and we do want TL4 flags to be quite strong.