Old Flags Resurfacing Suddenly

Hello!

I’m not quite sure what happened, but overnight a lot of old flags in our instance have suddenly re-appeared in the moderation queue, they all seem to be from within the past 30 days but we rarely have a flag last for 48 hours so we’re a bit confused why we suddenly have all of these notifications.

Did something change that could have surfaced these or is something else going on? Insight as to what happened would be appreciated.

Thanks!

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Hi Jessica,

We recently changed the default value of the reviewable low priority threshold from one to zero, which means that flags that were only visible using the (any) filter will appear when the Low filter is applied. We realized this default was confusing staff members, so every site can adjust it to fit their needs now.

Under the hood, we assign a numeric value to each priority filter (Low, Medium, etc.), which is re-calculated daily as the range of scores a flag can get changes over time. The reviewable low priority threshold setting value is always the value of the Low filter, and we calculate the Medium and High filters using the 50th and 85th percentile of the reviewables with a higher score.

We observed that these thresholds tend to converge near zero on sites with a large number of low-score flags, making them unusable. These changes prevent that from happening.

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This may or may not be related, but we are seeing a flag count of one (1) on every post as it appears in the forum (see screencap). We have comment approval turned on, but it wasn’t doing this before.

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I’m not sure why you couldn’t see it on your site before, but staff members and category moderators can see the number of flags a post has. If there’re any pending reviews, the count will be inside a red circle. The only recent change we made was fixing a bug that allowed TL4 users to see the count.

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Right. The comments in the screencap were not flagged, but are showing one flag. All our recent comments have one flag.

I just checked and I’m not seeing flags on moderators and Admins. Everyone else shows a flag.

These flags don’t appear in the Moderation Dashboard, only on the comment threads.

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Staff posts don’t need approval, so there’s no flag associated to those posts.

You can see the flag by clicking the 1 or setting the status filter to (all reviewed).

Showing the flag count when every post in the category needs approval seems a bit too much. What do you think, @eviltrout?

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Didn’t know that!

I will second that. There is no need to second guess everything other mods do. If it ever really matters we can do that from the Mod Dashboard.

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I agree, at that point it’s quite pointless. Is there a way we could hide them in that case?

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I think we can change the PostSerializer to skip them.

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Done here:

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