Community moderation is great – if enough people flag a post to hide it, moderators don’t need to get involved. What’s better is that the user who made the post is given an opportunity to improve the post so that it abides by the rules. But what if the user opts not to improve the post, and just lets it sit? The post remains “hidden” for all eternity.
In this perpetual state of being hidden, the post continues to waste a bunch of space on the thread, as it is as large as a normal post:
this is awful, as if the community flags a bunch of spam posts or some argument on a thread, even after the posts are hidden, the topic is still clogged by them.
To resolve this:
- Hidden posts should collapse into something similar to what the moderators see for deleted posts: “click to view x deleted posts”. This is super small and does not detract from topic readability. If the user edits their post to improve it, it will be moved out of this section and back into the thread.
- Posts that remain hidden for long enough without action (24 hours?) should be automatically deleted so that users can’t go prowling through another’s posts and find all the bad stuff they posted in the past