On another Discourse-based forum I’m on, when a post is hidden due to being flagged, users can still optionally view what the message was:
I’d like to see that option here on the PrivacyGuides forum as well. I’d much rather be able to read all the messages in a thread and have the full context of the conversation than to have my feelings preemptively protected. It also brings transparency, which I think we could always do with a little more of.
I agree.
This is not a configurable setting.
Technically viewing flagged posts is available to @trust_level_4 by default, but that is more of a workaround rather than a solution.
My understanding is that the trust level for this can be changed, which is what I was referring to. This is what they did on the Rust users forum: Flagged posts and freedom of information - #7 by steffahn - meta - The Rust Programming Language Forum
As far as I know it is trust level 3, not 4, which is achievable without being manually assigned, but I haven’t seen any configurable setting to adjust that to say 2 or anything. Are you TL3 on that forum?
I could try asking steffahn about it? It must exist; I’m the same trust level on both forums (level 2, that is)!
Yeah, I’m not sure. If it’s a setting in the regular admin panel that I’m just not finding because it has some weird name, maybe we can change it. If this is a change that’d require some manual config in the Rails console or patching some file at startup then we’re not going to make this change though.
I will ask and report back if I learn anything.
Flagged posts are hidden for a reason. WHat would be the point of flagging then?
Malicious flagging can be and has been abused for censorship of others’ perspective, so the ability to view hidden posts would counter it.
And that’s why the PG teams reviews it all to ensure of this. If they are made to be visible again, what purpose would flagging serve then? What I mean is, it defeats the purpose.
What I can say is that only people with a higher trust level can and should be able to flag because well.. they would be seasoned here and would know what’s acceptable and what’s a problem. So no new person who simply wants to “silence” another can abuse the flagging system to keep hiding posts (even if temporarily).
Potentially. But that does not happen. This has been discussed several times before. Only trusted regular users can flag things to hide them not new spam accounts, so this theoratical risk is not even there. Besides that we can unhide posts and do so regulary. If people abuse the flagging we would suspend them, afaik that happend once.
Here is supporting evidence of my statement from earlier:
The URL slug is admin/config/group-permissions, and here is a screenshot after filtering for the hidden_post_visible_groups string:
hidden post visible groups ↩︎
And that’s why the PG teams reviews it all to ensure of this. If they are made to be visible again, what purpose would flagging serve then? What I mean is, it defeats the purpose.
This is true, however it only becomes true if you trust the mod-team behind PG.
Which seems to not be the case anymore for many people here.
Thanks, good to know.
After thinking about it though, I am unsure what benefit this will actually have. Flagged posts are handled pretty quickly and they are generally either restored or they are deleted.
In the second case, this setting wouldn’t do what some of you are wanting it to do.
I think the only time a post would remain hidden and not deleted after a flag is if we’ve requested the poster to edit it, possibly because it contains sensitive/personal information or some other reason. In these cases the poster has full control over whether their post is shown or not, because if they edit their post it is automatically unhidden.
In this case I think it’s pretty clear we should not allow people to view the post until the poster responds with what they decide to do about it.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be in favor of this even if it was a configurable setting. This is how we end up with monthly threads of people airing out their grievances about how moderators did them dirty on some hidden post. I am not sure given the recent troubles this would benefit anyone.
I want to clarify first I don’t feel strongly about this one way or the other, but it might be helpful for e.g. cases where there are replies to a post that then gets hidden by flags to allow others to know the full context in the meantime.
I do think allowing this kind of defeats the point of hiding in the first place though (why hide it if half the users can still see it anyway?) so I don’t know if that is really worth it.
I mean honestly the way hiding works on GitHub isn’t terrible (comments collapsed with a reason and you can only expand them if you log in). If I had the choice to hide posts permanently in that fashion, that would be an incredibly helpful tool for hiding off-topic comments in some of our longer threads.
Unfortunately, the hidden by flags system does not really work that way here on Discourse. If I got the attention of Discourse that’s probably the one feature I’d ask for.
For the reasons we use then for here, and the fact that they’re a temporary state, yeah I agree it’s probably more harm than good.
