Well I’m not suggesting you write something like that! It would be harsh!
You could just say, “The moderating team understands your concerns but we don’t agree with this flag at this time”? Or maybe disagreeing with a ‘Something else’ flag should prompt you to write a response message.
Otherwise from a user point of view they flag the post for ‘something else’, say “can you please move this post as the start of a new topic”, you as a moderator disagree and click ‘disagree’, then you go off and do other stuff. Meanwhile the person who flagged it gets a message saying, “Thanks for letting us know. We’re looking into it” but then no action is taken which prompts them to message you eventually.
Out of interest, is there a way to alter these message templates anywhere in the system if we should want to?
It is tracked internally as a disagree. Longer term we had planned to disable people’s ability to send flags if you disagree with their flags enough.
In reality, there are never enough flags and flag signal for that to matter – at least I’ve never seen it on any Discourse site – so we didn’t do anything with it yet.
The message isn’t actually the same I have realised. It doesn’t say ‘we agree’ but semantically (in my view) it still conveys the moderating team haven’t disagreed with the flag.
Thanks for the help in finding the text and the info. I’m happy to close this .
Yup, the “we agree there is an issue” is subtly removed; easy to miss when scanning.
The text on Defer/Disagree could be replaced with “We’ve received the report and are looking into it.” but I’m not quite sure the change is worth the effort?
I don’t really understand the difference between defer and disagree, to be honest.
Recently got caught out by one aspect which is that if someone flags a post as problematic you can ‘agree’, ‘disagree’, or ‘delete’.
At the time I just presumed that I should hit ‘agree’ as this would cause the post to be deleted whereas ‘delete’ wouldn’t confirm with the person who flagged it that we agreed.
Unfortunately it just hid the post and then I ended up in a weird place where it would no longer accept flags to delete it because it was hidden (but any user could unhide it).
It was only later I spotted the Spanner tool in the thread view had the ‘select posts’ option that allowed you to delete an individual post.
I suppose “Ignore” only applies to me so that other staff will still see the flag? In that case maybe “Dismiss” would be clearer, though still not entirely unambiguous.
Okay, in that case the ambiguity is even more consequential because misinterpretation will lead to the flag to be entirely forgotten, even though the user only ment to let other staff decide.