This may be the case, however the thread these posts were found on is a public feature announcement, not a bug report, or question. In fact the vast majority of the posts on that thread are of the same caliber, and are statements of approval or anxiousness to try the feature.
edit: was going to add that, this isn’t just limited to short posts with no ‘substance’ randomly flagged posts appear throughout the forum, regularly, even ones with actual value, be it conversational or developmental.
IIRC posts like those are encouraged on public announcements, but everywhere else they’d be considered spam. Anyone reading should consider easing up on flagging that category.
All flags go to an inbox that staff manage I believe. Staff have the final say on flags and have the ability to clear the ones they find incorrect, so users being able to contest flags would just complicate the process.
Also the fact that this would have to be added by discourse and not roblox. When people request forum changes they need to remember that.
That’s not entirely true. Roblox can add things to Discourse via plugins. Whether or not this is something that could be achieved easily I don’t know. I’m not familiar with the plugin API.
I was just about to make a thread about this. People are abusing this feature. I’ve been flagged before by just disagreeing with a staff member. And now people are getting flagged just for expressing their approval/thoughts on an update? Come on, now. The community should never have the power to hide posts. The fact it gets hidden until moderated approval is absurd. Should be the other way around.
Would be great if they actually addressed every single one, but they don’t. The flaggee is just left wondering what they did to get under everyones skin.
The problem with doing this is that it clutters a thread with comments that hold little value. Valid concerns or thoughts on the update are buried in endless ‘this is nice’ type of comments.
It should be noted that a flag is not equal to a judgement of morality or an imminent strike. A flag means a user thinks the post is either not belonging where it was posted or does not have anything to add to the topic.
When flagged, the poster is given the option to edit their post and it immediately becomes visible again afterwards. This is more or less a reminder to the poster to revise what they said, and consider whether it’s worth adding to the topic or whether it’s not all that useful after all.
This is indeed a problematic aspect, however, if after edit the poster posts again and the comment is flagged again, devrel is guaranteed to take a look at it manually. In this case devrel would notice that the post does not violate any guidelines, and the people flagging it may have action taken against them. After all, abuse of flags is against the rules as well.
What scares me the most is that a bunch of players could flag a ton of important posts because enough people flagged it.
What you claim is an issue by the guise of “clutter” isn’t really a problem at all.
Is it really guaranteed? There’s little to no feedback for the flaggee to verify this.
There’s a fine balance to be had here and I feel this sides too far in everything having too have x amount of productivity points. (especially in an announcement thread)
Why not?
Scroll past it or look for staff responses. Anything can be seen as clutter if it does not fit the agenda of the individuals problem. But focusing on that exclusively doesn’t balance individual vs collective very well.
That link posts what they can do. Not if they’ll do it.
This doesn’t seem a solution at all, more so ignoring a problem or trying to work around it.
While this is true, for something to be hidden multiple users have to consider it such. This is much more likely to happen for clear-cut cases like ‘this is nice’ or comments about a completely unrelated feature.
If the same post is hidden a second round of flags, the flags must now be manually handled by a moderator at that point, there is no automatic unhiding through edit possible.
(https://meta.discourse.org/t/so-what-exactly-happens-when-you-flag/275/3)
It only must be handled to have it unhid. Doesn’t guarantee it will be though.
What is a problem for one is not a problem for another. This is why I stress individual vs collective.
When you involve everybody there has to be sacrifices that stray away from ones agenda. In this case I see censoring all of expression of gratitude and contentment to be a bit too productive points focused.
You’re fine to disagree, i’m just not for this level of strictness. Not like it is going to change so ill have to deal with it.
All flags are manually reviewed by a staff member. They will unhide your post if they disagree with the flag and take moderation action against anyone who maliciously abused the flagging system.
If your post hasn’t been unhidden, that means a staff member has agreed it was flag-worthy. Flags are not a complicated subject.
Honestly when ever something like this happens to me I just message the top contributor or staff member that responded to the flag to find out why it was taken down then go from there.
A guilty until proven innocent approach is really weird, don’t you think?
Also weird that we have to go out of our way to get an explanation instead of just getting a reply when it was being reviewed.
Nope. This is a post being removed – not imprisonment. If we had to wait a day for posts to be taken down pending each flag to be manually reviewed, the damage would already be done. The point of community flagging is that it’s fast enough to keep up with the conversation.
If you appeal multiple flags successfully and get your posts unhidden, then maybe there’s a discussion to be had, but otherwise it seems like flagging is working as intended. You should check back in once you do that.
The community is too large for moderators to send personalized feedback for each post. You can DM Dev_Engagement_Team if you have any specific questions, but in general, seeing “inappropriate”/“off-topic”/“spam” and then re-reading the forum rules should be enough to tell you why the post got flagged.
For the post that motivated you to post here:
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/official-rules-of-the-roblox-developer-forum/46429/16
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/official-rules-of-the-roblox-developer-forum/46429/11
You can also ask the Lead_Top_Contributor group for information on why a post was flagged. They do not have access to the internal flag queue, but can generally tell why a post was flagged since they are extremely familiar with the forum rules.
How is this off topic it’s on topic I’m agreeing with how countries use a similar system to prove if someone does something wrong… Just like flagging doesn’t mean we did anything wrong but we have a chance to prove we’re innocent… (I’m using this as an example because it’s literally been put right in front of us.)
It was most likely flagged because the entirety of the post is a reasoning fallacy that doesn’t particularly contribute to the discussion.
(Please contact me privately instead of responding here if you want to continue discussing about that one particular post.)
I don’t know why you had to say its not imprisonment. Did my point get missed that ‘guilty’ points to a post having something wrong with it and that as soon as they decide that to be wrong it gets assumed as the correct decision then one has to go out of their way to prove its not?
Damage? What damage is there to be had? Is someone saying “nice I like this” really that damaging that it not being removed in a conversation immediately warrants this? The only time arguments really happen these days is when Roblox does something that causes public outrage. People usually keep their crap-talking to Discord.
I’m actually saying this place is too strict on ensuring every post has a specific amount of productivity points. The early days were too far on the loose side of the spectrum and now we are on the other side.
Really this is a statement of disagreement with the direction of the forums which ties into the disagreement with all of these flags.
I take it you’ve missed some of the threads that were disasters in real time that were only prevented from spiraling even further out of control due to the flagging system. Since you’ve missed them, I’ll just say that that’s the damage to be had: people getting into heated arguments or trolling since nobody could put a stop to it.
This has always been the case; you’re just noticing it more now since the amount of posts being made has skyrocketed along with the number of members.
