Why did you flag my personal message?

feature
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In a two-person private message, suppose one of the parties flagged the other person. Managers see the flag and, in addition to checking, hide the flagged post.

At this time, a message will be sent to the other party stating that “your post has been hidden by the community report” along with a direct link to the post. In my opinion, revealing the identity of the reporter is not a good thing and it is better to always be hidden.

Consider that discourse may be used in a school and a student may want to report a threat to principals …

It would be great if we could change the relevant system message for private messages or prevent it from being sent.

3 Likes
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I’d like to second this and the past complaints that the hidden-number, opaque flag threshold system is not good for predictability.

Smaller forums deserve the predictability of person count guarantees for automated actions, and just in general avoiding a single user flag from having any visible effect except in exceptional circumstances (the old “TL3 spam flagging TL0” rule).

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This seems very specific:

  • when in a PM with only two people
  • when one of those two (and only two) people flags a post in the PM
  • when the staff agrees with the flag and hides the post

I’m not really sure why this is a problem. It seems so narrow. I’m not even following what you’re describing here @riking

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The “flag sensitivity” settings which incorporate a user’s past flag agree score means that a single user with a good flag history can trigger the “this post was hidden by the community” display with an off-topic/inappropriate flag, if your score is high enough. That fact that it also works in PMs is just a particularly bad special case.

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This seems very specific, but it can happen a lot in large forums. I think the identity of the reporter should not be revealed under any circumstances, this is very important.

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And yet, out of thousands of customers, and eight years working on this project… this is literally the first report of this “problem” I’ve ever read.

I think it’s obvious to the point of being ridiculous to even talk about, that if only two people are in a PM, and one of the messages gets flagged, obviously the other person flagged it.

Waving your hands around and saying “oh this should somehow be a big secret, when two people are in a PM and a flag mysteriously appears” is just… an incredible waste of everyone’s time.

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I do not know, maybe we are too strict about this. Others may point to this in the future. I’m sure good decisions will be made over time as always.

1 Like