The persistence of posts hidden by flags are a bane to our community

[rahim123]

Thanks a lot @mcwumbly for looking into these improvements. Here’s my inflation-adjusted $0.04 –

@mcwumbly

Continue to show “This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden” to everyone while a post is in this state.

Yep, seems necessary to keep a placeholder so that email notification links to the hidden post don’t break.

• And what about if the hidden post is the last one in a topic, would it still bump the topic and appear as the latest post N hours/minutes ago in “Latest” topics?
• Would it be possible to also hide or replace with “System” the hidden post owner’s avatar and username? I had a hand-crafted community moderation system very similar to this on the previous forum platform before I migrated to Discourse, and hints about who got hit with the mod hammer or who flagged their posts always led to lots of controversial discussion in the thread and never turned out well. In my experience it’s best to quietly eliminate the trouble and move on.

@mcwumbly

Only provide the “View ignored content” option to the following users:

• Author of the flagged post
• Staff (admins, moderators, category moderators)

Good. Regarding TL4 users I still wouldn’t want them to see the hidden post content, so if possible it would be nice to make that optional.

@mcwumbly

Should others who flagged the post be able to see the original content when it’s in this state? We originally were thinking “yes”, but have left that out above as we don’t see a strong reason to allow them to continue to see it once it’s been hidden.

I would also say no. I think it has to do with a fundamental psychological tendency toward being fascinated with conflict, and users will often go to great lengths to perpetuate an argument.

@rahim123

Users get fixated on a lively argument, or if a post has inappropriate content even more so, and they’ll take advantage of any UI that is offered to view it. Try putting a physical big red button with a “Do not push!” sign in a public space and it will probably get more pushes than if you change the sign to “Please push me”.