In Discourse 2.3 we unified our Review Queue. There’s now one convenient place to go to review all types of content (Flags, Queued Posts, Users, Akismet, etc.) During this update, we took the opportunity to upgrade how flags are prioritised and dealt with.
Flagging Accuracy
When reviewing flags in the queue, moderators will be presented with an icon that indicates the flagger’s previous accuracy. For example, one our users here on meta has a thumbs up rating:
If you hover your mouse over the thumb icon, you’ll see more detailed stats. Out of 8 flags this user submitted, the moderators agreed with 88% of them. 0% were disagreed and 13% were ignored.
As a result, when this user flags a post in the future, their flags will be given more weight because they’ve done a good job in the past. Discourse will only consider the user’s last 100 flags to give them a chance to improve over time.
Flags from users with higher trust levels are also given more weight.
Flag Type Priority and Sensitivity
Staff members can choose to prioritise flag types. If you click on 
Settings in the review area, you will be given a list of flag types and the option to re-prioritise to them your needs.
In Admin > Site Settings you’ll find a variety of flag sensitivity settings. Iif you really trust your users, for example, you could set the hide post sensitivity to High. If you want to let questionable content stick around a bit longer, set it to Low.
How Discourse decides what actions to take
When a flag comes in, Discourse will prioritise it based on the above signals:
- The type of flag and any extra priorities
- The quantity of flags
- The flagging accuracy of user(s) who flagged the post
- The trust levels of the user(s) who flagged the post
- Whether it was flagged by staff members
It will then make a decision based on:
-
hide post sensitivity- for hiding the post -
silence new user sensitivity- whether the new user who made the post should be silenced -
auto close topic sensitivity- whether the whole topic should be temporarily closed
Tuning the Review Queue for High Traffic Forums
If your forum has many users and is receiving more flags than your moderator team can handle, you should consider changing the review default visibility setting.
The default setting of Low will notify you of every flag in the queue. Setting it to Medium or High will require a stronger signal for the flags to show up. This usually means more users will need to flag the post, or fewer users with better reputations.