People use the Flat / Report button as a substitute for an eyeroll emoji , to indicate ;TL/DR;, or to otherwise express irritation with formatting or grammar or some other off-topic reason.
The result is “Your post was flagged by the community.”
A user who goes to a moderation category to ask about what happened might have the same people coming back to flag that inquiry!
I’ve seen this in my groups and just had it happen to me in another. I feel the pain and insult of helpless suppression that’s completely unrelated to the topic, coming from community rather than by official moderators.
If mods/admins trust that flags are community guardrails they might not check logs or argue with the community … even if such judgements of content are made by maybe two people of hundreds.
This leaves me looking at the Discourse platform wondering “what can I do about this as a manager and as a user/member?”
Some people are generous and flag content for us. But that privilege can be abused by the few people who discover abusive power in the tool they wield. Do we have an option to suspend the right of individuals to flag content, or to help users to appeal such a flag?
Thanks.
(And yeah, I feel like I’m whining because it just happened to me, but it did spark the chain of thought… )
If people are abusing the content flagging system, they shouldn’t be permitted to use that system, period. It is not a feature to play with as it wastes time and deters other community members from posting, even if what they posted was in accordance with the site guidelines. An official warning should be sent to the individuals who use the flagging system inappropriately, and if they continue their behavior even after moderator intervention of a warning, then restricting their accounts to trust level one (which disables flagging) would be appropriate, or an account suspension.
I completely agree and was going to add this into the OP. A problem there is that when there are thousands of members and daily flagging, this becomes just one more load on management to monitor.
I’m surfacing the challenge and wondering if there is a better way.
This isn’t unique to Discourse, of course. I’ve seen it in every forum platform that allows community down-voting with automated content removal. People abuse the thumbs-down feature in social media so much that some platforms get rid of it.
Over time respected content monitors start to include their personal sense of elegance into their judgements of OT or harmful content. They might be trusted community leaders for their contributions to the content, but that’s completely unrelated to their personality and judgement as community managers. Some people are very helpful in discussing topics of common interest but that doesn’t translate to a right to censorship of others.
As site owners we need to manage the managers - herd the cats. In larger sites that’s just another time-consuming task that few of us ever spend much time on.
Summary: I/we can watch for Flags, read flagged posts, check the reason for flagging, and ask managers to be a little less heavy-handed. But the ability to flag seems to be locked to TL1. We don’t want to change a user’s trust level, although by-definition if we can’t trust the user to make better judgements then we kinda need to. This leads to more flexible Group permissons rather than TLs.
For the user/member though, there doesn’t seem to be a way for people to appeal community TL1 moderation if the community TL1 moderators have the ability to suppress appeals. Again, the burden is on the owner/admins (everyone here) to monitor activity and enforce policy. How many owner/admins are actually aware of this?
If you are part of that mod tea.. A site wide announcement reinforcing the purpose and rules for flagging a post. People who consistently break this rule face being silenced.
Otherwise you need to contact the mod team of the site and see if they would look into it.
I see in a subreddit - perhaps in all - the downvote action comes with a tooltip “Don’t downvote because you disagree!” Perhaps the flag dialog can have a similar note, and perhaps the tooltip too.
I agree that persistent abuse of flags is an offence, and in my view demotion, temporary ban, permanent ban would be the series of responses.
Never feel that your community needs to retain all its users at all costs.
I just visited the thread where this situation was developing.
Recap:
I posted a long inquiry, lots of question, required thought for anyone interested, wasn’t looking for a specific single answer.
That was flagged then auto-closed for inactivity following a single long and well-considered response, the kind I was hoping for.
I asked about it in the general “About this Forum” category.
That inquiry was flagged/hidden.
Someone else posted a response, I believe to object to the censorship.
That note was flagged/hidden.
I’ve seen this kind of thing a lot, more-so in recent years. I stopped using StackOverflow, in part because of this kind of gross abuse by mods there - modifying content into something different and then flagging it as being OT.
It’s interesting to see this play out live - but we’re using tools that allow this to happen without conscious recognition. That’s all I’m bringing up here.
For my immediate purposes I’ll see if I can find a way to contact the site owner of this large Discourse installation, but that in itself is a challenge. I don’t object to the shelter that we’re given with no “Contact the Admin” button. I’m guessing they appreciate it too.
I can see that other members have given you some great suggestions already!
it seems that you are not the admin / moderator of the site in question? [1] However, I will post some ideas for everyone to read.
Its not healthy for discussion if people are using flags as a ‘weapon’ for personal disputes/disagreements. Users should be criticising ideas, not people.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned is changing the hide post sensitivity of flags so that it takes more flags to reach a threshold and be hidden. However, that does not address the fact that the post can still be flagged unjustly by others.
Really, the best options are what has already been suggested which is reaching out directly and issue an official warning explaining they will be trust level locked or suspended if they continue.
You could maybe use this as an example?
Other options are to turn down max flags per day in your site settings.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here by “appeal community TL1 moderation”.
I’ll reiterate this
Even if the user has been a long time active member, if they cause a detriment to others they shouldn’t be there. Your community, your rules.
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