Mehrere Posts wurden gelöscht, nicht nur versteckt. Auch in anderen Threads. Diese Sachen sind nicht die wichtigste aber irgendetwas mit dem System stimmt nicht.
To bring context to this conversation, in the past quarter the “resolution” time of 99% of the flags has been under 24hs with and average response time of 8hs.
That means that if any message happened to be flagged incorrectly, it’s been fixed in the coming hours by moderators.
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Two hidden posts in June were eventually deleted. I insist that they weren’t contradicting the community guidelines.
The only action I have taken recently, and I can’t speak for the other general moderators but only myself, was censoring I believe only one message in Mapping minority-owned and women-owned businesses
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Now that I understand your situation more clearly. I will say you were as reasonable as possible given the topic matter.
You weren’t. I do think this mechanism of automatically hiding flagged posts should maybe be reconsidered.
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The hiding of post by community flagging develops into one of the most annoying features of the Discourse forum software imho. The major problem is the intransparency of the process. I have already asked last year (post 21) where to find some info about how the post hiding works. The link provided by @nukeador lead to a Discourse site full of blah blah blah but no transparent information how it works.
Intransparency kills the users trust into a software. It is ridiculous that even the moderators and the governance team do not know, how the parameters for the post hiding by community members are set. If we cannot get a clear and transparent description of the process it could be better to disable this function and leave the hidinig/deleting to be done be the mods only.
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Normalerweise wird ein Beitrag erst “versteckt”, wenn dieser von drei usern geflaggt wird. An einem getesteten Beispiel hat das auch genau so funktioniert. Ob das immer so funktioniert oder in bestimmten Situationen oder Konstellationen anders funktioniert, kann ich nicht beurteilen, da ich das bisher nur einmal getestet habe.
Which would seem to imply that either:
- moderators didn’t even attempt to moderate for the prolonged period of several months, or
- moderators did check the posts and decided that the community flags are valid and post should remain hidden and eventually deleted, or
- there is some major bug in discourse and flags are (at least sometimes) not put to moderators to validate
perhaps @forums-governance can shed light on which of the three happened in your case?
Since they are deleted I cannot comment on that, but if it is so, do note that just because there were humans appointed as moderators that validated the block (this is assumption, see above), does not mean their decisions are always perfect. False positives happen. Do the false positives happen way too often? Then it might indicate problem with such moderators. But, as noted above, it is not clear to me what has actually happened in your case.
Funnily, I find that one of the rare features where Discourse got it right 
(much else, from horrible javascript bloat to lacking mailing list support to unintuitive and hard to use threading support, inability to have several tabs open without major issues etc. is in much worse condition)
Discourse is open source/free software; it literally cannot be more transparent than that. 
Now, is Discourse likely too complex piece of software for its own good? I’d agree that it is.
That might be true (but I was under impression that at least governance team can see what exactly happened to message, even if category mods can’t), but does not seem to be the error of the software feature itself. Perhaps lacking or complicated docs, perhaps lack of time to read it up, perhaps it’s explained just fine but you or I haven’t looked there.
Does the feature need tuning its parameters? Probably. At least it would be nice if category mods could see details of flags in “their” categories (maybe we already can, I don’t get much flags so can’t check), and IMHO it should always needs at least 3 flags to autohide the post until mods get to it.
Thanks, @Matija_Nalis. I had the chance to have a good and reasonable discussion with good and reaonable moderators. I must add that it seems that the Ukrainian moderators changed since the posts were flagged. It doesn’t change the fact that there is an imbalance between the flaggers and the flagged person. Even a post wondering about it was flagged here. In the normal world, anyone should of course be taken seriously when reporting an issue. Defamers and authors of false accusations are however punished. The deleted posts cannot be recovered and the bullies which flagged even this post will likely continue to harrass other persons.
That’s because human moderators of the Ukraine category decided that the flags were valid. It is not an example of an issue with the automated systems in Discourse.
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There are, it seems, two issues related to these cases. One being the choice of the former Ukraine moderators which arbitrarily eventually deleted post not violating the guidelines, and secondly with the sensitivity to the flagging, leading to the hiding of posts in this very forum. They are related but different as you say.
In your particular example those flags were rejected by the mods and the person abusing the flagging system was stopped from doing that again. Abuse of flagging is something very easy to identify and handle by the mods.
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Update:
There is a comprehensive description of the flagging process by @pnorman available now:
Thanks for your effort, mate … 
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