It’s still enabled, but it’s up to the person creating the topic to opt into it, rather than opting out of it.
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If you have concerns about a moderator’s actions you can raise them with @forums-governance. The flagging system will automatically weight a user’s reports when considering if a post should be hidden before a mod can review it but we do have some other options for handling any misuse of the flagging system in severe cases.
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We turned it off because people thought they were replying in thread, and then the responses got all out of order with the voting buttons, and the whole thing was a mess.
That discussion happened here.
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This discussion on the limits of moderation has highlighted a very serious, structural issue that the forum administration needs to immediately address.
The core problem lies not in any single moderator’s decision, but in the potential exposure of private user data. Specifically, information provided via the “Notify staff privately” function. If the reporter’s identity or the content of a private report is made public, this could constitute a failure to protect user privacy, potentially leading to significant legal liability for the forum and moderators depending upon the specific jurisdictions they operate in.
We need a clear, unambiguous policy that guarantees the confidentiality of all private flags. I believe this requires a formal review of the current moderation rules.
I am raising this here to make the community aware of the severity of this systemic risk to the legal status of the OSM forum, and I formally request that the @forums-governance team initiate a process to reform the moderation guidelines to explicitly prevent the disclosure of private reports in the future.
I would also suggest that aside from the legal risk a terrible job of communication and de-escalation has been done in this case. An issue as small as a dispute over a post being hidden should not have resulted in a potential legal risk to the forum and should absolutely not have been addressed in a way that can appear to make the moderation of the forum look so deeply unfair. The release of information that a user considered private in a report is a terrible look and severely undermines the ability for users to report serious issues.
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How do you suggest that forum moderators should deal with bad faith “revenge flagging”?
What happened here was that:
- Someone flagged several posts in the thread
- The forum mods are asked what they want do do. The options include “hide”
- I chose the option “hide” in all of the cases because (a) some of them were very offtopic and (b) one of the replies was prompting the user to make public employee’s private locations (the user providing the answer didn’t realise that, because they hadn’t researched the question being asked)
- A flagged user then took offence at this and “revenge flagged” other posts in the topic.
I can understand why they were upset (they thought that they had provided an answer, but hadn’t actually thought about the risks of the OP following their advice).
Unfortunately bad advice is still bad advice, and once someone has posted some personal identifiable information on the internet it’s effectively there forever. I therefore stand by my decision to accept the flags that another user had suggested for the relevant posts.
I also went into some detail above about the problem, “revealing” the user that felt hard done by about their posts being flagged (when it was of course clearly visible to
anyone reading the original thread and this one).
Beyond that is how should the forum deal with bad-faith and “revenge” flagging - I:d be interested to hear constructive suggestions on how to deal with that.
Bluntly we can either make the “help and support” area where people unfamiliar with OSM can actually go for help, or an irrelevant sub-Discord chat channel. The choice is ours.
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In any jurisdiction I’ve encountered, “significant legal liability” is exceedingly unlikely to arise from some shut-ins squabbling on a little map forum. But my knowledge is limited to jurisdictions on Planet Earth, and given that I’m increasingly unsure what planet some of the participants on this thread inhabit, I concede that there might be a theoretical legal risk there.
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It is interesting how much emphasis is being put on the “Notify staff privately” phrase on the flag post popup as if it means there is some expectation of privacy. I’ve always just taken it to mean that I’m sending the mods a private/direct message rather than making a public post in the forum. I’ve not interpreted it as “whatever I say to the mods and even the fact that I clicked the flag button is private information that nobody else will ever know about”. If I flagged a post and then a mod mentioned publicly that I was the one who flagged the post (as happened here), I would not be surprised.
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This is not what the TOS say though.
”All reports will be kept confidential. In some cases the Moderation Team may determine that a public statement will need to be made. If that’s the case, the identities of all victims and reporters will remain confidential unless those individuals instruct us otherwise.”
Private means Private.
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I don’t think anything was wrong regarding the flagging and how you dealt with it. But rather that it was called out in public. If flagging is private, it should stay private. Moderators can simply ignore revenge flagging or deal with that user via private messages.
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Why do you keep thinking it is “revenge flagging”? I have only ever made 2 reports the entire time I have used this forum. Why do you feel the need to release private information about myself, yet at the same time pretend like i was trying to incite private information out of a company?
”All reports will be kept confidential. In some cases the Moderation Team may determine that a public statement will need to be made. If that’s the case, the identities of all victims and reporters will remain confidential unless those individuals instruct us otherwise.”
Did I give you permission to share my reports and private information? no. So why did you?
Is it time to move this thread to This Site Feedback?
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Yeah I was in that discussion.
The plugin is half baked and leaves reply buttons in places where they’re confusing, which really doesn’t help.
I’m reluctantly stepping in here as a forum governance team member because this involves moderator conduct. I’m closing this topic because it has drifted off-topic for the help and support category, if it was appropriate here in the first place. The help and support category is for a category for people less familiar with OSM to go get help, not a forum for lengthy discussions. Technical limitations[1] require more moderator action in the help and support category to keep it useful for newcomers.
Flagging a moderator’s posts for the content of their posts is fine. Flagging them because you believe other actions were “improper use of the hide feature” is inappropriate use of the flagging functionality.
The forums governance team will be reviewing this. Privacy is one thing we may be looking at but we have no explicit requirements listed[2] and the fact that reports were made was first disclosed by the user who made the reports. We also may look at how to keep the help and support category focused on help and support in the future as well as preventing inappropriate use of the flagging system.
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