so you are blaming the tooling for what exactly? what is the “hole”? I’ve read all your posts in this topic and I am really struggling to see what your point to all this is, other than that you are unhappy with the moderation on another forum that happens to use Discourse.
what undesirable outcomes? that you had a post flagged that you didn’t agree with? how is it the “tooling” that is at fault here?
is this what you are asking?
if you have over-zealous flaggers, perhaps you can create a custom group for such users then omit them from this setting (and maybe lock them to TL-1), or trust level rate limits, etc. flags start pms with moderators so you can appeal there.
Seems that the problem you are talking about is the way the system automatically responds to flags when there is not moderator presence to review those and they are just left unresolved? Thousands of members may be too many for this community where you are experiencing this.
Would a solution to this be a change in settings so that there isn’t an automatic response to community flag reports, but those just go to alert a moderator who can make a decision about those? If the mods/admins at the site you are talking about aren’t open to new ideas like that then there may be nothing you can do.
אכן ניתן להתאים את סף הסימון להסתרה של פוסטים. עם זאת, אז אתה מסתכן בכך שפוסטים יהיו גלויים שאולי כדאי להסתיר עד שיבדקו כראוי.
מניסיוני, בין אם זה פורום Discourse, Reddit, FB וכו’, לעיתים קרובות אנשים חסרי סבלנות מדי ומצפים לפתרונות מהירים. אולי זו בעיית תרבות שלמה, כפי שאתה מוצא זאת גם במוצרים שנרכשו הדורשים תמיכה לאחר המכירה.
הנה רעיון: אם הקהילה גדלה ויותר מדי דגלים הם באיכות נמוכה, מה דעתכם להסיר את היכולת להניף דגלים מ-TL1 ולהעביר אותה ל-TL2? משתמשי TL2 יהיו ככל הנראה בין המשתמשים המתנהגים טוב יותר והמחויבים יותר לקהילה, ויהיה להם יותר מה להפסיד אם הם מאוימים בהורדה בדרגה עקב שימוש לרעה בדגלים.
Censorship is a strong word and may not be correct to use in this context.
While you are a guest at someone else’s site they have a right to edit what you want to publish in public view with their platform.
If a government is prohibiting you from publishing what you want on your own site or with multiple different platforms/publishers then that may be censorship.
Apologies if my last post wasn’t in support of this vision, someone flagged that but mod here elected to not moderate that out. I agree that would be a different talk about the definition of censorship and the history of that is a whole different thing.
If you want to keep this topic going seems like you may be proposing changes to the core flag system for the platform? A feature request topic may be better for that.
Do you have any suggestion on how to better handle this?
It’s a problem that I’ve personally never faced, so I’m curious to hear if you have a recommendation
Until that time, I think @KhoiUSA, @Ed_S and @ondrej nailed it in their initial replies:
Quick note: when looking through the lens of People, Process, Technology; a lot of times, we community managers look at Technology for solutions, while often it’s much better to deal with the People part first
אני מודה לכל מי שקרא ו/או הגיב כאן - וסבל קצת בלבול.
נקודת פותח השרשור (OP): היכולת של דרגה 1 (TL1) לסמן תוכן מנוצלת לרעה בקלות.
הצגתי דוגמה חיה וביקשתי דיון קהילתי. זו לא הייתה בקשה לשינוי ספציפי.
זהו סיכום של הצעות רבות ונקודות מבט בנושא (לא כולן מכאן):
לשקול את דרגה 2 (TL2).
להגדיר מדיניות להכרה במצב.
להודיע למנהלים על כך ולטפל בניצול לרעה של מודרציה קהילתית כמו בכל מקרה אחר.
אפשרות אפשרית אם/כאשר קבוצות (Groups) יחליפו את רמות האמון (trust levels).
להגדיר/לעקוב אחר/להגביל סימון יתר/מוניטין כמספר/% של סימונים על ידי אדם יחיד, אולי נגד אדם אחר.
יכולת לערער/לסמן/להתנגד לסימון קהילתי.
קטגוריות או תגיות שלא ניתן לסמן קהילתית (כמו ערעורי מנהלים).
“אני לא מבין.”
“אני מבין אבל חולק על כך שזו בעיה.”
“;TL/DR;”
שרשור זה נסגר על ידי המנהלים, ערערתי על ההחלטה, והשרשור נפתח מחדש - תודה רבה על ההזדמנות לערער. זהו תהליך המודרציה המבוסס והתקין - בדיוק התהליך שניסיתי להציג כבעיה במודרציה הקהילתית.
אני לא מרגיש שיש לי עוד מה לתרום. אין לנו קונצנזוס מוצק שיש בעיה, או בקרב אלו שמכירים במצב שיכולה או צריכה להיות פתרון טכני. סבבה. חיפשתי רק דיון בין מנהלים עמיתים ו"משתמשים" מכובדים בפלטפורמה, לא מסקנה. אני מצפה לתגובות נוספות שעשויות להופיע כאן לאורך זמן.
I think this maybe isn’t as large an open goal as it first sounds.
Mostly, TL1 is a reasonably brief phase for most people (default 15 visits and some light participation), so the window of opportunity to do this isn’t that large before they become TL2.
But to hide a post it needs to accrue enough ‘points’ to push it over the hide post threshold (as admin/mod, you can see the reviewable score for a particular one by clicking on the question mark icon in the top corner of each reviewable in the queue). For low trust users they get a lower point boost than higher trust levels (only 1 point for TL1) so you’d need more flags from more users to build up enough to hide a post.
There’s also a user’s flag reputation as well, which has a direct effect on whether it adds or subtracts points based on how many previous flags have been agreed/disagreed with. So if the mods are disagreeing with all the flags these TL1 users are submitting then their reputation should tank and future flags will have even less chance of hiding anything.
This topic has some info in about how the user reputations work (and hide sensitivities too if you were looking to change something on your own site):
Also, it’s worth noting that the ‘something else’ flags don’t trigger a hide post.
I think normally when topics crop up about disingenuous flaggers it’s more about them wasting staff time rather than having too much of a public impact. Though the ‘hide post threshold’ is a dynamic number based on some magic under the hood, and I think I have seen at least one example of it being unintentionally super low which did mean it was more of a hair trigger than it was intended to be.
But if everything is working as intended then there are already some reasonably sophisticated safeguards in place.
When using the word “policy” that falls on the site staff to create and implement
As both @JammyDodger and I have mentioned there is indeed a reputation in % based on agreed/disagreed flags.
I am onboard with the idea of being able to create groups to restrict things like flagging. To which this maybe possible at present with the new Dynamic Groups plugin. Though may need a feature request/PR.
I do agree that it should be made easier to request an appeal to a flag. One idea would be to edit the template(s) system post to include a link for appeals. This may need some tweaks to ensure a link to the flagged post is included.
This falls on site team/category moderator communication.
This I believe could be done with some CSS in a custom Theme component to display none for the flag button if in said category, tag…This could also be used to hide the flag button if a user is in a group of “flag abusers”.
Great discussion. Moving different site settings or overrides to groups is definitely a great idea.. The plugin I mentioned might be able to accomplish some of these things. The author also has Category restrictor plugin that adds ability to silence a user from a category vs a complete site wide silence.
While we are on this topic as well. A suspension iirc does mention to message to appeal more or less. However this template should include an email link or ability DM/pm a specific group or defined user. In theory the site contact email should be fine. However to make it easier it should maybe supply some Text linking to the flag/suspension post.
There certainly seemed to be at least one problem in the original situation you described, but that is difficult to diagnose correctley with limited information. There didn’t seem to be a clear technical problem that could be identified with the platform which has a fairly sophisticated flag system.
This is an important statement I agree with this. There can be all kinds of problems with leadership and staff policy implementation that are unrelated to the community discussion platform.
