Warn users without affecting their flag count

Say a user posts something like

I love this idea. I think it would be great to see.

I don’t want that user to be punished by affecting his/her flag count but I want to be able to easily give the user an infraction saying please use the heart instead of responding. I’ve gotten stuff like this a few times on other forums from mods with similar things like “post in a different section for that”.

Maybe just have a “minor” flag level for things like this?

I don’t recall from my testing, but does using Notify member_name permit this? I’m thinking that doesn’t actually give them a flag associated to their profile. Only Off-Topic, Inappropriate and Spam actually result in flags accumulating.

The more I think about it and play with it, I believe neither Notify options result in a flag on the user’s account.

4 Likes

Yes, but I would like to be able to send an automated message like the one you get from a flag. Something like this:

Hello,

This is an automated message from Discourse to inform you that your post …

I love this idea. It would be awesome.

… was hidden due to community flagging.

Your post was flagged as against the community guidelines: please use the heart button instead of replying to +1

For additional guidance, please refer to our Community Guidelines.

You’d have to write a plugin to do that. Personally, we just use an extension called Clipper that we save a lot of “default” messages to and copy and paste it into the PM box.

I use Firefox with Clippings though some prefer to use the vB “canned replies”

Not “automated” but it saves a whole lot of time not having to type the same message repeatedly.