slashdot . org proved many aspects of what is wrong with community moderation. One being the henchmen that flag whoever they don’t like, and in unison they flag the same posts of what other henchmen flagged to put more weight on it. This used to matter.
Discourse is nicer in that regard. I don’t see anybody wanting to be a henchman here.
Note: there was no age limit on slashdot, so the flags flew that much more… uninterestingly.
I want to thank whom ever flagged my last post for proving my point beyond a doubt.
The flag system is for flagging TOS violations, if you flag a post for any other reason you’re wrong. So there clearly is a right and wrong. Although I am still trying to wrap my head around what you are saying.
If by 99% you mean
I’d agree. But thinking the flag system is being used by the community to hide TOS voilating posts, in my opinion, is rather naive. As I have said I offer up this thread as my proof. Of the many TOS violations in it most all were ignored by the community except for 3. One was a clear no questions TOS violate, one was a joking rib, one was simply an emoji. So in order for a TOS violating post to get flagged it must offend someone.
Am I going to change them? You know I’m not, why? I don’t think they are a TOS violation. I think some; in my opinion, overly sensitive person/people flagged them. So I don’t feel I’m the one with the issue.
This one agrees.
Now I see Jimbo’s post got flagged. I didn’t do it even though it was directed at me, I took no offense. I like Jimbo regardless of what he thinks of me. I took it as a chide not a TOS violation, but apparently other persons believe other wise.
Now I was done with this, I take issue with people inferring I am ignorant because they miss the point; yet still did not flag the post. But as an experiment I went back to an old flagged post. Edited it to say the same thing but in more pleasant verbiage. In no short order it was flagged and hidden again. So just how does that work?
I have an opinion, you know what it is, so please tell me how I’m wrong.
No it is most certainly not… and I believe that’s why you’re having a hard time understanding.
Only the circled entry refers in any way to their community guidelines… and even that leaves it up to the interpretation of the user… based on what THEY think a reasonable person would be offended by…
All the other flags are completely subjective and have nothing to do with the ToS.
For example I can very easily think that this entire conversation you’ve been having with Codemage for 60+ posts is entirely off-topic… and proceed to flag each individual post because based on my observations the thread was not meant for a debate on whether forum moderation is up to your standards or not… and what kind of injustices you think you wittnessed… it was meant as a tutorial for users to know how it works…
And that would not be an abuse of the system… I would have a very valid justification that I believe this thread was not meant for this by the original author so you’re basically spraying graffiti all over it and vandalizing it (how surprising… there’s an option for that too…)
All of these are SIGNALS to the mods… like Codemage tried explaining… they’re essentially “Telling on you”… based on THEIR opinion… and yes it can be very subjective and vary from person to person, which is completely fine… and that’s what I tried pointing out in my previous post… that the community in question will have a large impact on what they find okay and what they don’t, which has nothing to do with your typical freedom of speech or what you find okay or not.
Speaking of signals to mods… I can very easily flag your post and choose the last entry and simply explain to the mods that I think you’re deliberately arguing for the sake of causing controversy and trying to get the thread hidden. I don’t have to be right about it… but it could be the “vibe” I’m getting and the flag system offers that communication option to alert the mods… It’s there to be used…
To me it seems this is what you’re having difficulty with… understanding this concept that your idea of what is just or unjust and how the system should work simply does not matter…
However you’re free to flag any post based on your personal opinions as well.
I’m sure you’ll be fine as long as it can be argued that it’s reasonable of you to believe it falls into one of the categories listed on that flag interface… once it cannot though, then action may be taken against you for abusing the flag system.
Which btw is not that elusive to determine as you might think… and that’s why there’s a human element at the end of the line in the form of mods / staff.
Pardon, when I say TOS I use it as a blanket term to cover rules and regulations, including what was outlined in the flag system explanation. I should have said as much earlier.
That doesn’t change the fact people are far more whiling to flag a post because THEY take offense to it, then select a rule they feel applies to the post.
The real problem is that people also want explicit jargon files that supposedly sum up their motives. They just want it to stop. Of course the motives could be benign, but the returned jargon is out of this world. Don’t expect anymore professionalism being applied.
Seriously, flags should trigger an investigation. I think the mods, however, close the discussion due to potential “advertisements” (and comparisons). 
Generally, we close the discussion when it is no longer a discussion. Threads will also be closed when discussing exploits or server bans and for any reason that the thread does not belong in the forums.
Agree about it not being “spam”, but think it would be more “inappropriate” then “off topic”, Thing is for some reason the spam rule also covers “not useful or relevant to the current topic”. Basically reiterating the off topic rule.
And vandalism For me vandalism is an actual psychical act in the real world and doesn’t relate to a forum.
It’s certainly a lesson. It shows how one post can be argued to fall under several flagging reasons, in this case all of them 
You can vandalize a digital space. Vandalization of a forum thread is moreso the end result of a thread derailment. When things have intentionally spun so far from the original post the discussion is maliciously taken over, that’s vandalism.
Off-topic is the steps on the way, vandalization is when you get there.
That is a proverbial can of worms there.
Specifically, reasonable.
This one opts themselves out of the classification of reasonable. This one knows they are only rarely reasonable and have very… other than typical modern… sensibilities in many matters.
There are several other kettles whom this pot notes belong with them in the same pigment club, in this regard.
Now, there is a pervasive desire to see the self as reasonable, or at least one’s perspective as such. Who champions a point they know is absurd?
(Ok, bad question, Advocating for the Devil is a popular pastime) Implications that one is other than reasonable can easily be taken as offense. Triggering another instance of potential flagging.
But let’s step back.
What is reasonable in one nation or culture may be beyound the pale in another. When using a second or subsequent language, this can become even more fraught with difficulty.
What all those paragraphs were leading to is the subjectivity of that element of the system.
And a notation of sympathy for those who feel they have been unjustly targeted.
While this one is amiably inclined to the current system, it’s easy enough to see why some may find contrary to what they consider reasonable. By default, this one finds anything that appeal to the consensus of community members unreasonable. Down that path leads the worst aspects of populism and rule by cliques of demagogues. That’s an explanation of this one’s knee jerk reaction. Fortunately we are talking about the low stakes of forum posting. Which is only serious business in the trademarked facetious sort of way.
However, preventing forums from becoming a complete cesspit is serious work. Internet slap fights can quickly ride the slippery slope to feces flinging. Unenviable duties. Especially considering this particular forum orbits an IP about a person notedly disdainful of many civil systems and word mincing.
For being Howard fans (or at least work adjacent fans) this forum is extremely well behaved.
This one feels it important to point that out from time to time. For a throng of people playing bloody handed slavers, theocratic maniacs engaged in human sacrifice, and dark sorcerors who literally commoditize the souls of living victims… We get along remarkably well.
The stakes are even lower than that, considering that flagging doesn’t really do much. Yes, if enough people flag you, your post will get temporarily hidden, but the way out of that particular “predicament” is clear and easy to follow, with people stationed along the way to help you out. And should those people have to help you out too often because someone else keeps wrongly putting you in that situation, they also have the power to stop that from happening again.
The question is really whether you trust them to do that properly or not. And if you don’t, well, I wouldn’t go to a restaurant and complain that I don’t trust the kitchen to produce food that’s safe to consume…
This. But to go into more detail, here’s the difference between Community Moderation, and normal Moderation:
In Community Moderation it works how Codemage described. The community can flag a post. And the idea is the poster will alter the post to be more in line with guidelines. Yes it has bias attached to it. Sometimes things can be false flagged. But the alternative is no better.
But let’s talk about the alternative, normal moderation. In that system there is no community flagging. Just a report button that flags staff to be notified. Then they take action if there is action to be taken. There’s no feedback that stuff has been done. And likely there won’t be in most cases. It is also subject to bias because things only get flagged if people want to. So if something is in violation but isn’t flagged it stays up unless a moderator happens upon it.
Here’s the issue with normal moderation that community moderation mitigates however. The amount of notifications staff get. Think of all the flags you see on a daily basis. Now think of our moderators having to sort through all of those? With community moderation, they are only notified on second flags which cuts down on the notifications they get dramatically.
The results mean they can act quickly and efficiently.
The problems brought up with community moderation are still present in normal moderation. But normal moderation has a much longer response time. The system while not perfect, is a superior system.
And just how many is “enough”? I know people have pointed to … sum number, like how many is a handful?
Ya I know, but do you?
I find it hard to believe enough people are reading a two week old dead thread to flag an edited post and have it rehinden in no short order. Still waiting on an explanation to that one.
What about the post here I edited and was flagged/hidden again before I could finish reading the edit. How many people could have read and flagged that post in that few seconds?
It seems by some peoples account there isn’t enough people active in this thread to get a post hidden, yet I had 2.
The most amusing thing is one of those posts that got flagged as an emoji, I edited and expressed the same sentiment the emoji did and it’s still up
ETA: It also isn’t temporary, it doesn’t just unhide.
Okay, so are you actually asking those questions because you want answers?
The default settings for Discourse are in the link I provided in the original post, so normally it would be 3 users with trust level 1, 2 users with trust level 2, 1 user with trust level 3, or a mix.
As others have already pointed out, these default settings have been adjusted to require more people to flag a post before it’s temporarily hidden. How many exactly? I don’t know, but feel free to reach out to Andy if the exact number is important to you.
People who flagged your post will get a notification when the system unflags it because you edited it. If someone happens to be on the forums at that precise moment, and they click on the notification, they can look at the post and see if you fixed the reason why they flagged you. It’s probably faster to read one specific sentence or paragraph than it is to read the whole post.
“Active” can mean many things. People don’t have to post anything in a topic in order to flag a post.
You would have to ask whoever flagged you. In this case, it wasn’t me. I find both the emoji and its substitute to be disingenuous, but that alone is not something I usually flag for.
And you can keep waiting for all I care, seriously. I’ve been explaining how the system works and why it works that way and I’ve frankly run out of patience for your demanding attitude. If you can’t think of a reasonable explanation without my help, maybe someone else can cater to your demands.
It’s temporary, because it doesn’t stay that way. It either gets restored through your actions or the mods’ actions, or it gets deleted after 30 days. It’s not permanently hidden behind that banner. This information is available both in the original post, and in the link provided in it, and scattered repeatedly in various posts in this thread.
That is what I meant.
Nothing personal right. Seriously who monitors a weeks old post they flagged
Ya, I figured that, and all it infers.
Good, because you’d be wrong.
Temporary infers a time limit. there isn’t one, it wont just unhide over time.
I’ve never had a mod unhide a post, in fact except for a thread, I’ve never contacted a mod about a flag.
And I’m sorry you don’t understand the issue with the flag system, I’ve tried to explain and I’m out of ways to make it simpler.
But hey, I’ll try again. It’s about people taking offense, not about helping enforce forum rules and regulations/community guide lines. People will flag a post they find offensive long before ones that violate other forum guidelines.
Codemage, seriously I know you can read through this thread and find at least 6 posts that should have been flagged. You may have even flagged them. But they aren’t hidden because not enough people were offended by the post to flag it.
Are you starting to get it’s not about the rules but the emotions and biases? As I said I know how the flag system should be used, I also know how it is being used.
That’s what I tried explaining in one of my posts above 
The simple answer to that is: We KNOW… and it’s NOT an issue, but part of the system BY DESIGN…
If you type stuff that offends more members of the community, then you need to find a way to word stuff better… else the system will filter your posts out of this community.
It is absolutely working as intended and 100% by design to keep controversy to a minimum and yes… to filter our people who repeatedly tend to upset other members of the community…
And I get it that to you this feels weird, because it’s not in line with the typical “freedom of speech” ideas where you can say whatever you want and have the right to do so.
So yes, we understand that this is bothering you and we get what you’re trying to say, we were just trying to explain how things work, which are not in line with how you THINK they should.
You keep bringing this issue up and have yet to offer a solution. If you don’t have one, then alright, lets all just agree that life and the world in general sucks, now let’s move on.
I’m sure you know my opinion of that, but it ain’t this
To me there is a difference between a bit of chain tugging and kicking someone in the shins. But in my opinion, some people on here will scream foul if you reach for a chain.
It’s also my opinion some people are just bias against certain forum members.
What if it’s a specific same few members trying to filter what is said on the forum. Recall my first post
Replace some one with same few.
Nobody “monitors” it. The system sends a notification. If someone replies to a weeks-old post of yours and the system sends you a notification, are you also going to say you were “monitoring” that post?
“Temporary” does not mean “automatically reverted after a specific time limit”, it simply means “lasting for a limited time” or "not permanent. However, as I’ve already explained repeatedly, there is a time limit for the state we’re discussing. A post cannot stay hidden by flags for more than 30 days.
Okay, and my son’s pet is a guinea pig. So what? What is that supposed to have to do with anything we’re talking about here? You keep repeating it as if it had some kind of importance, but it doesn’t really tie into anything.
It’s not about making it simpler. It’s about your claim that the system is “broken” and “systematically abused”. It’s not systematically abused, unless you want to accuse the moderators of not doing their jobs, and you said you didn’t. And it’s “broken” for your own definition of “broken” that, frankly, I don’t really care about at all, because it simply means “I don’t think Funcom should moderate their forums this way”, to which the answer is “the door is over there”.
No, it’s not. That’s what you assert, but you literally have no data about users’ intentions. Did you, perhaps, conduct some kind of a survey about the motivations of the users here which shows that the primary motivation is something other than to help moderate the forums?
I believe people will flag a post they think doesn’t belong. Sure, that could be because they find it offensive, but it could be because they don’t think it’s relevant to the topic, or because they think the way it was written will turn the discussion into a flame war, or whatever.
Unless you mean to say “users don’t know what flagging is for, so they’ll use it only to flag certain stuff”, and guess what? A post that explains what flagging is for should help, shouldn’t it? 
At any rate, what matters is that people will flag a post, and the mods will either let that stand or revert it. If they revert it, they judged that the post belongs. If they let it stand, they judged that it doesn’t belong. Either way, it’s an act of forum moderation.
No, I can’t. For every post in this thread that I think should have been flagged, I’ve either flagged it myself, or it had already been hidden by flags by the time I read it.
See, this is where you go wrong, and why I said you literally don’t understand the relationship between flagging and “forum rules”, as you call them. You seem to assume that flagging is the full extent of forum moderation. It’s only one part of it.
Like it or not, the essence of community moderation is that the community participates in the interpretation of the community guidelines. There’s a reason they’re called “guidelines” and not “laws” or “scripture”.
What you call “biases” is the community input. The mods are perfectly capable of making their own call about a post or a thread without that community input, and sometimes they do, quite visibly. But the rest of the time, they let the community participation do its job and make their own calls based on that.
I get that there are people who dislike this model. I understand @LostBrythunian’s objections along the lines of populism and tyranny of the demagogues. In fact, this is why the quality of the community moderation depends on the quality of the community. I already mentioned this before, although perhaps in stronger terms than I should have. I said this community has been allowed to devolve and stop being a community, and I’m not entirely sure about the latter.
This community certainly isn’t the kind of community I’ve seen on some other forums, where people care more about keeping the toxicity out and maintaining a certain level of discussion. But it’s also not 4chan. I’ve been here long enough to remember many other community members who cared and who were slowly driven out by rising toxicity. I know a few others who are still here, but aren’t participating nearly as much as they used to, because of that same rising toxicity.
If you can read all that and still reach the conclusion that flagging is the problem with these forums, and that the community shouldn’t have that participation in forum moderation, then that’s the fundamental disagreement you have, not only with me, but with those who run this site, too.
Feel free to point a finger at me directly if that’s what you wish, and I’ll explain in detail exactly how and why you’re wrong
I can’t speak for anyone else, though, so if there are others you want to point a finger at, you’ll have to make your own call about whether you want to do it or not. 
Ah, screw it, I won’t even wait for you or anyone to point a finger at me, I’ll just say my piece right away. I flag behaviors, not people. I’ve had very heated exchanges with people. You can ask @Taemien, for example. We’ve butted horns quite often. There are others, too, but I won’t tag them needlessly.
And yet you can ask those same people, and they’ll confirm that I’ve liked their posts when I agreed with them, voiced my agreement and support, and even stood up for them occasionally.
I try to do that even for people whose typical behavior makes me dislike them. And vice versa, when it comes to people I respect, admire, or like on these forums – I’ll disagree with them or flag them when I think I should.
Am I doing that perfectly well? No, but hey, that’s why I keep talking about “community”. That’s what being in a community is like: you don’t have to be perfect and you don’t have to do everything right all by yourself. You can rely on the rest of the community to do their part.