Ein weiteres Problem: nur ein Teil des Postings ist off-topic. wenn es als off-topic geflaggt wird, wird der ganze Beitrag versteckt. Das kann eine Diskussion erheblich stören, weil ein relevanter Teil (on topic) ausgeblendet wird.
Ist es einstellbar, dass als offtopic gemeldete Beiträge nicht ausgeblendet werden, sondern nur eine Meldung an die Mods erfolgt und diese es im Einzelfall prüfen. Mahnende Worte sind meistens ausreichen.
Yes, especially as the description when reporting a post says “not relevant to the discussion”. I think most users would read that as the specific discussion currently in progress, not the entire forum.
Also there is no indication to the user that reporting a post in this way could result in it immediately being hidden.
Thank you for the reminder. I still think, in a civilised community, members should be given the means to argue their actions. So if I flag something off-topic, I want to be prompted to state a reason, that could be displayed instead of the flagged post. This system here just sends a canned statement, quite a blunt one, too, to the poster and the community. This made me shy from flagging, because I rather not appear as such a bastard.
I was told, that this system works like that, in order to protect whistle-blowers. So perhaps, flaggers should be given the choice, to remain anonymous, or to state their anger? Second choice might even give moderators the last bit of info to gauge the issue. Yet, I was also told, this is just how discourse works, and the OWG cannot do much about it.
I think it is ok that flaggers remain anonymous to the users, but the threshold for offtopic has to be raised significantly in order to hide a contribution. One single person should not be sufficient, something like 3 seems more reasonable to confirm it is probably offtopic or at least contentious.
In general removing the post completely is not appropriate for what is “only” offtopic and not insulting, personal attack, or somehow else offending the rules. For the latter it seems ok to hide them while offtopic could be folded and let the user decide whether they want to expand it nonetheless.
I think this was me, I wanted a few posts moved to another topic.
This was unclear to me, I interpret off topic as something that doesn’t pertain to that particular topic.
Could there be a specific option to advise moving the post to a different topic and maybe optionally specifying which topic it should be moved to?
Then this flag should not be called “off-topic” but something else instead. There are lots of topics here, that is what the “t” in the URI stands for? But there is only one forum. Perhaps “off-community”?
In addition to avoiding an misunderstandable formulation, i consider hiding a contribution by a simple click by any user as not desirable.
It seems to me as a relatively heavy action and I would leave that - after notifying - for mods, especially since this action is prone to misuse.
A “notify as …” instead of “off-topic” should suffice.
Given the experience in the heavlily used german forum this happens not too often to be a problem for mods.
These are the settings we can tweak
But there is none to change the sensitivity just for off-topic flags
I agree. Also because all of my posts that have been hidden have later been restored by a moderator, which demonstrates that hiding them before was likely the wrong action to take.
I just had a look and the german explanation for the “off-topic” action is exactly like your interpretation.
Am Thema vorbei
Dieser Beitrag ist nicht relevant für die aktuelle Diskussion im Sinne des Titels und des ersten Beitrags und sollte wohl verschoben werden.
“This post is not relevant to the current discussion in the sense of the title and the first post and should probably be moved.”
The hide post sensitivity might be worth changing to “Low”. Your link says
If you really trust your users, for example, you could set the
hide post sensitivityto High . If you want to let questionable content stick around a bit longer, set it to Low .
Probably things like spam posts or posts that clearly are “bad” would not be hidden as quickly, too. But as I interpret that info page, the moderators will still get a notice, even if the offending post is not hidden yet. And if it’s a really bad post, many users will flag it, which should lead to it being hidden soon enough.
I have followed this topic but are not sure about the actual settings. I have read “What happens when you flag a post” linked above but that does only show options, not settings. I would be interested in how many users of each TL have to flag a post to “hide” it (until further action by a mod). Any place to find this info?
The threshold might be different depending on user trust level and something like a “internal reputation score” that the system calculates, this is the only thing I’ve found:
I had several posts marked as spam on this thread Overturemaps.org - big-businesses OSMF alternative. They were restored by moderators, but it was pretty confusing for me. This doesn’t really seem to be working as intended. This is way too easy way for someone to abuse their “trust”. If someone is found to abuse functions like this on discourse, does that affect their reputation score?
Hi mikelmaron,
did you read the link one post above yours? I think it answers your question.
I have no idea what posts where flagged previously (and was not involved) but I’ve just flagged a load of posts now. Small things that looked innocent at first end up turning that thread into one in which we spent as much time criticising each other as we did discussing OvertureMaps. Once again, OSM proves that it’s community channels can be unpleasant places 
My response to SteveA’s clearly inappropriate message was flagged and hidden as spam for being an overly promotional advertisement. I don’t care if the message is hidden for being inappropriate, but it clearly wasn’t promotional spam 
Although if my message is hidden SteveA’s should be to since it’s clearly abusive.
FWIW I don’t think that “just hiding some posts” will actually help. There’s at least one known bad actor in that thread and just hiding some of their posts while leaving others will actually give a false impression of their behaviour and general reasonableness.
Part of the problem is Discourse’s lack of threading (Even when you’re reading it by email, which supports threading natively). Long threads inevitably descend into sub-threads. The moderators here have sometimes split those out manually into completely new threads, which is confusing in a different way. I don’t know what the solution is in “out of the box” Discourse; my personal answer is to read everything by email and move messages from people and about things that I know I don’t want to read straight away into a separate bucket.
Jut to add one more (probably pointless) data point to this. In mapping-activities-in-active-war-zones-in-ukraine several people made a series of off-topic comments, which where never hidden despite me flagging them. Whereas my second to last comment was apparently flagged and hidden as off-topic.
I assume that’s because I was the only person on my “side” of the discussion and I just don’t have enough clout to get comments hidden on my own. Whereas, other people discussion had it and people on their side. Which, if I’m being honest, really seems like a bad way to handle flagging/hiding messages.
Really It should 100% be based on if the post is actually problematic or not, instead of favoring whomever is lucky enough to get other people to join them mass-flagging dissenting opinions as some type of censorship play or whatever. Same goes for the “clout” based thing to some degree. Just because someone has more contributions then someone else in a discussion doesn’t mean they should be able to censor that persons views about a topic.
At the end of the day all reports should be treated equally by going to an administrator and being reviewed based on the merits of the report. Not who reported or how many mass-flaggers they can muster up to report someone with them. As it is, the current system really isn’t fair to new contributors, people who don’t post much, and “loners” (for lack of a better word).