Flagging messages multiple times

Adamant1 · 2022-11-29T04:19:18.717Z

About a week ago one of my messages was supposedly flagged by “the community” as off-topic to the purpose of the discussion. It was subsequently determined not to be by an administrator, or at least I assume it was since I tried to flag it myself and it wouldn’t let me. I don’t remember the exact message I received when I tried it, but it was something along the lines of “This message has been determined to be on topic” or something like that.

So fast forward 5 days and I received an automated notice that the message was hidden because it was flagged as off-topic. This seems like a bug to me. People shouldn’t be able to continue reporting a message as off-topic if it’s already been reviewed and determined not to be. Especially if doing so leads to the message being hidden and it’s writer receiving spam messages about it. I shouldn’t be continuing to receive messages about non-issues in a conversation that was already reviewed by multiple administrators, subsequently dealt with, and that I’ve had nothing to do with in almost a week. Hopefully it’s a problem that can be fixed on automated systems side or something.

nukeador · 2022-11-29T09:23:43.908Z

Your post was flagged as off-topic and hidden, moderators reviewed it.

The system should have told you that you could edit the message to fix the issue. In this case I see you edited the message to add a question mark.

The post was automatically un-hidden, but again the community flagged it as off-topic and reviewed by a moderator.

To sum up: Your post keeps being off-topic and now will remain hidden even if you edit it.

This is how Discourse flagging system works, it allows authors to have the opportunity to review their flagged messages once, but if it flagged again, then it will remain as hidden if the mods review it this way.

Cheers.

Discourse Meta – 19 Sep 22

What happens when you flag a post

What happens when you flag something? 📣 Site admins are given significant flexibility via Site Settings to adjust how flags work. This topics assumes that all site settings are set to their default. Many of the automatic options presented here, like...

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Adamant1 · 2022-11-29T12:47:13.566Z

nukeador:

Your post was flagged as off-topic and hidden, moderators reviewed it.

The system should have told you that you could edit the message to fix the issue. In this case I see you edited the message to add a question mark.

So this is how it went, the post flagged as off-topic and hidden 5 days ago, which is when the moderators reviewed it. The system them sent me a message saying I could fix it like 6 hours ago. As far as I know I haven’t edited since then and I don’t think I edited it after it was flagged and hidden 5 days ago. I don’t know why I would have. Especially to just add a question mark. But even if I had, the fact still remains that I haven’t had anything to do with it since then and the system is still sending me messages for something that was already dealt with multiple days ago.

nukeador:

This is how Discourse flagging system works, it allows authors to have the opportunity to review their flagged messages once, but if it flagged again, then it will remain as hidden if the mods review it this way.

I don’t have a problem with that. But it should have occurred and been settled 5 days ago when the whole thing originally happened. For all I cared it could have been hidden at that point. Hell, even I flagged it as off-topic after you said to flag Richard’s messages since I didn’t think it was fair to selectively decide what part of the conversation should be hidden or not. Regardless though, it still doesn’t really help to re-message someone weeks later about something that they don’t care about anymore and that has already been reviewed. Maybe I’m just not doing a good job of explaining why or what the issue though, but it seems pretty straight forward on my end

nukeador · 2022-11-29T12:56:24.642Z

Unfortunately with the information I have at my disposal I’m not able to provide a better explanation on what I think happened. We can keep an eye if similar situations happen again in case there is an issue with the flagging notification messages.

Adamant1 · 2022-11-29T13:07:23.757Z

OK. Thanks for explaining it to the degree that you did at least. I’ll look through the page you linked to when I have some time to. Maybe that will help me understand it better