Forum Flags on the new forums

Community General Discussion
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As everyone should be aware of by now, the old WoW forums had to make place for new forum software - an open-source program called Discourse, but a heavily modified one.

On the new forums, instead of a report button, there is a flag you can use to report certain posts. However, contrary to the old forums, flags serve other purposes as well and the community is able to keep itself healthy through reports. I’ll try to describe how the new flags work, and how they will influence the forums without any moderator-intervention.

First of all, a lot of the settings are possibly modified by Blizzard, especially the amount of flags that are necessary to trigger a forum response. All the numbers discussed are guesses, based on Discourse’s normal settings.

What happens when you flag a pots?
When a post is flagged, the moderators will immeditatly be notified. They’ll be able to review the flag, and decide whether they are valid or not. If the flags are approved, the moderator is able to immediately respond by, for example, deleting the post, editing it, or silencing/banning the user. If a moderator does not agree with the flags, the flags will be removed and the post in question will be restored.

The people who have flagged the post are visible to the moderator, but to no one else. They are completely anonymous.

Automatic responses
Apart from the notification that is sent to the moderator, the forum itself features a kind of a “fail-safe system” that will protect the community if necessary. After a specific amount of flags, the forum will take action.

After three flags (again, the amount depends on the settings Blizzard has chosen), the post will be hidden. It can be viewed by every member, but they have to press a button to see it (instead of immediately seeing the post, they will see a notification that the post has received too many flags and needs to be manually opened). The author of the post in question will be able to review and edit his post after ten minutes, and once he has edited it, the reply will be automatically unhidden for everyone.

If a post gets six flags, the same will happen, but this time the post will remain hidden until a moderator steps in. Hidden posts will be deleted automatically after a month.

The next step is a bit more tricky. When multiple posts in the same topic get flagged, and the flags are unresolved by a moderator (by default, 12), the topic will be closed until a moderator steps in. The flags need to be given by at least five different users, and it doesn’t matter which replies are flagged. In a way, the topic will be paused. A moderator will handle the flags, solve the problem and the topic can be re-opened.

The system highly depends on moderation. If moderators don’t step in, threads with a lot of flags will remain locked. Moderators will always need to check whether the flags are valid. However, it’s also a way to protect the community. If a conflict arises, and a lot of posts are getting flagged, the thread will get locked and a possible conflict is avoided.

The end results always depends on moderation.

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This actually sounds reasonable enough. If it comes to verbal blows, the thread will just lock itself preventing the rise of negative emotions until the moderator reviews it. That’s an improvement :slight_smile:

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The only danger is certain groups that target other users or topics, causing the topics to close without a justified reason until a moderator comes in. A moderator can see a lot of info on the user, such as how many posts he has flagged and how many of those flags were deemed valid, so a good moderation team will be able to spot unjustified mass-reports.

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This means that IF there were any organised malicious group of people, they could keep mass reporting everyone they do not like and practically rule the forum but only as long as a moderator finally sees the pattern and hopefully puts a stop to this action, right?

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Yes, in a way. I’ve read somewhere else that false reports decrease your trust level (although I don’t know a lot about the new trust-system, but that and the flagging seems to be linked) but I’m not sure about that. That’s something we’ll find out later.

Also, I know for certain that threads get automatically locked on other Discourse Blizzard forums, but I’m not entirely sure whether posts get hidden as well. I think it’s a good feature, but it really depends on how well moderators do their job.

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It sounds rather positive anyhow. I think we’ll be fine :wink:

It all seems like real improvements.

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Lets hope moderation is done well :crossed_fingers:t2:

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I suspect they will have protections in place to gaurd against unwanted flagging of posts simply because people disagree with opinion, or at least they have made amendments to this so all flags are moderator-approved/unapproved.

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Agree. It’s all going to be down to the moderation.

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