Proposing a new "Spoiler" category of Flag

Feature
1

Spoilers are a huge deal. Especially for communities of fans who gather to celebrate certain works, and do not want these stories to be ruined for themselves or for others by spoilers.

Spoiler tags help to control problems that are caused by spoilers, but they are not always used correctly. Whether it be someone who didn’t read the forum rules and guidelines, or didn’t realise something was a spoiler, or simply just forgot, sometimes spoilers are left untagged.

I am proposing a new “Spoiler” category of flag with new function to help further control the problem of spoilers. This new flag would immediately hide a post when it is flagged by any member, not just a moderator. This way the spoiler would be hidden from view as soon as possible, and would been seen by as few people as possible.

2

This would be an enormous abuse vector. That said we talked about allowing flag customization but have not slotted it to any release quite yet.

3

You’re not wrong, but I feel like this comes down to an admin’s discretion of how they want to run their forum. An ideal method would be that use of the flag immediately notifies the moderators, so action can be taken against either the spoil-er or the flagger. You could also keep the feature available only to members of a certain trust level. Flag customization would be very helpful here, as I’m sure it’s not something all forums would appreciate having.

Alternatively, could this be something a plugin could address?

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4

Not easily, customising flags via a plugin is going to be tough. There are not many extensibility point.

My off-the-cuff estimate for building an extensible flag system would be about 1-2 weeks of work for an experienced Discourse dev.

5

Nonetheless, I hope it’s a feature that will be seriously considered for development in the future.

6

Sorry for the Necromancy, but I’m just wondering if either this would be more feasible/acceptable today or if the extensibility that @sam referred changed in a way that one could implement custom flags?

With blank extensibility on flags, possibilities are endless, but the specific case of Spoilers (even though abusable, although that’s something for the mod team to enforce/protect unless we do want to develop a more complex system based on the “Rep/Trust” percentage that exists today) is very valid, as any community with Games/Movies/Series/any content that could be spoiled would benefit from this kind of quick hide flag.

And yes, we do have two different ways of tagging spoilers when writing, but sometimes it is accidental or not so accidental (which is a whole different can of worms) and hiding stuff until a mod comes helps.

Once again, sorry for the Necro, just thought that this post has the best “likely to show when looking for that idea” ratio.

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