Only full members should have the ability to flag posts

FYI: Top Contributors don’t review flags or act on bad forum etiquette (in a way that has authority, some of them do send feedback messages sometimes of course), they just have the ability to bring up issues with us.

As for Community Sages, we also cannot see why a post has been flagged. Only Developer Engagement can see this and respond to the flags.

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Worth looking at:


I don’t think your examples are showing New Members flagging posts.

I agree that if you don’t have anything specific to give feedback on, and just want to show someone you like what they made, a like button is enough to do that. Otherwise such posts will be just laying around, without any message to it.
Same for the second example you provided. There’s no message to it. You don’t know what he’s asking about. Each post requires effort, and this one is just a plain question, without any context that could be referred to if somebody replied.

I think this change would be bad.
Why should we have to lose access to things simply because others aren’t ready for this forum.
Punishing a part of the community (New Members) as a whole is bad move.

False repeated flags by users should be met by a warn on there account.

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After further reviewing this, I think I understand why some people are for and against it.

A majority of the Full Members agree with this because they know they’ll handle it responsibly and are not positive of how the New Members will handle it.

Every New Member is against this change because it will cause problems for them trying to do what is right.

Can we just stop bickering irrationally and help the New Members learn the rules rather than policing them like they’re children?

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I personally feel that this feature deserves to be used by new members too, Although there are a increase in post flagging there’s also a increase in posts made by new members and others alike that can be deserving of a flag. In conclusion, the whole point of the flagging system is to help with moderation and if posts don’t abide by the rules or if they’re just not contributing to the post then possibly they could be making incorrect posts in the first place rather than the people flagging them.

You’re right in your words, A lots of replies have been flagged, But I don’t think it’s only the fault of new members, I think it’s important to new members to be trusted, As new member having the ability to flag, I feel trusted, by restricting this ability, new members will never be trusted, So I think remove ability to flag to new members will not make progress things.

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I have a very hard time seeing why the two posts in the images qualify as ‘maliciously flagged’. I would never consider either of those posts to be ‘meaningful, contributive, and on-topic’. I would suggest you read this post, it explains a good solution to the small complements seen in your screenshots.


As for my opinion on the solution, preventing new members from flagging is rather extreme. It’s better to have false positive flags than no flags. While the solution would fix new members incorrectly flagging, all new members would suffer from the loss of the feature.

This statement varies depending on what you consider an ‘unnecessary flag’. I disagree with OPs screenshotted posts that they were flagged maliciously, so what’s ‘unnecessary’ is up for debate.

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Thanks for this, in which case I mean the Developer Engagement Team (If they are able to talk about what they see from their side)

I appreciate the comments made by New Members, especially as it brings a perspective I don’t have as a full member which enriches conversations on this forum, I’d particularly like to thank @guigui3434 for his thought provoking comments on the idea of trust.

Perhaps a solution would be to look at when posts get automatically suppressed due to user flags, and perhaps raising that bar or adding some further requirement for suppression?

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I dont compeatly agree with this, new members should be able to flag posts but indeed there should be a way to restrict abusing the system.

I.e A stricter new member selection system.
A separate review system for the posts flagged by new members.

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Checked with Dev Engagement Team, and out of the two posts in the OP and the two that were posted in the Discord:


there is only a single flag that been submitted by a New Member. The majority of the flags are coming from Members. None of the flaggers are troll/malicious accounts.

The reason you’re seeing this after the wave of New Members is because with so many new posters, short posts like the example four have become increasingly spammy. When there were only a few of them, it wasn’t much of a bother, but when there are so many, they impede the ability to read more valuable posts. These posts are actually against the forum rules as well:

The two from the Discord and the first example in the OP should have been substituted with a like. The second example in the OP does not provide sufficient content (teach-me-everything vs specific questions) to be actionable, so all four posts are rightly flaggable. As the forum grows to host more users, what we used to do in the past may not always be practical at scale, so we will need to adapt. This is true in this case, so in the future, make sure you are avoiding 1-sentence posts. Use the like button or provide more thought-out posts.

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I’d like to add that publicly visible sections of the forums are held to a higher standard than other sections.

I know that I’m more active about flagging posts on public announcements, and I’m sure other people are as well. Comments like “very cool” shouldn’t exist in general, but they should exist even less in public sections. It dilutes actually meaningful feedback.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Remove lounge Off-Topic

Closing due to unwarranted bumps