It seems that the forum has had a recent change. Previously, if a post had been flagged by someone, there was a small icon that allowed you to see what the post was about and if you were in agreement about the flag. Now this has disappeared and post contents become instantly inaccessible. I think this would be OK if, for instance, the post contains dangerous links, but with posts with other kinds of controversy, I think that allowing, for a time, for others to see what the buzz is about would still be good.
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I noticed that too…
I used to read the “hidden” posts just to see what they were about…
Since I’ve been through this yesterday, mostly by my hand, this is how it seems to work :
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if some people flag a post as something (let’s say out of topic or spam), it’s hidden but you can still ask to see it. the author can then edit the post and it becomes visible again.
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then, if it’s flagged again, it’s masked until moderation comes in.
You’re referring to the bevel post. Someone came and started a rant post about how SU lack tools and is a disgrace and should buy extensions and push them on us (the author himself called it a rant). Then several persons came to argue about this. This is a rant that has happened on several occasion, on separate dedicated threads where people were free to express their anger and frustration.
Opening a new thread to express your anger is fine. hijacking someone’s accomplishment to create a debate where nobody’s listening to the others is not.
But I agree with you that if possible, the messages should remain visible by clicking until moderation comes in and deals with it.
I’m not familiar with this forum architecture, I don’t know the extent of what’s possible or not for moderation. Can they do that ? Can they extract a group of messages into a separate thread, branching away from the original content ?
edit : I genuinely thought that by flagging several messages, they would still be visible by clicking until moderation came. had I known, I would have only flagged one, to attract attention from the moderators. Then again, I’m surprised how masking a bunch of posts worked. thread went back on tracks immediately.
Yes they can, Aaron and Colin have done this on several occasions when threads have started branching heavily.
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I’m more than happy to see my off topic posts deleted together with the off topic source post. Less confusion and resulting a clean on topic thread.
Though often with flagged posts you would still like to see what was said to keep track of the whole discussion. (Not in this Whaat thread).
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yeah, often when people flag stuff, they tend to flag ONE post that was problematic, ignoring the 4-5 that followed, making it a weird situation where you have a topic, one masked post, 4 off topic, and you feel like you’re missing part of the story.
flagging ALL of the problematic ones makes it so the off topic branch of the thread stops at once. but yeah, pruning the branch and posting it separately would often be better.
Plus, all the users flagged got a notification, they shouldn’t be surprised their posts got deleted in the end. If you don’t flag all the off topic stuff, you end up with people asking why their posts got deleted with no warning.