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.
You’ve been around the forums as long as I have. You know as well as I do that it hasn’t always been the case. It used to be the complete opposite. The influx of members and posts correlates with the rising standards. We used to be able to post memes, crack jokes, and praise updates with absolutely no moderation. Even arguments unless it got really bad.
If you make this environment too professional you end up with a cold, rigid, soulless environment with no personality. It neglects the community aspect of a forum. Back in the day we really embraced community and got to know each other but it was at the cost of the productivity because people crap-posted way too much. There is balance to be had here that I don’t think we quite have right yet.
You’re probably right especially if it is in a mega-thread. I never read those.
I agree with you to an extent, but I think there’s a time and a place. It makes it incredibly difficult to ask actual questions about an update or change if there’s hundreds of “okay this is epic” comments. There’s no way you can expect Roblox staff or even most users to read through all of those. The professionalism is so that this forum can actually be of use to people instead of just being a place to chat. The same is true of feature requests and bug reports, and even support threads aren’t really the time nor place to be cracking jokes or shitposting. They all exist as resources to someone and it’s disrespectful to those people to pollute them.
The correlation between the influx of members and posts and the increased enforcement of the rules is fairly understandable. When one person is making jokes and straying off topic, it’s a lot more readable than hundreds of people doing the same thing.
There’s something to be said about the community aspect being neglected, though a look at #lounge and the various Discord servers says that’s not entirely the case. It’s just not happening on public or in development-focused threads.
I know it was less of a concern back when there was less members. And I can see the drawbacks of what allowing unproductive social oriented posts can have against the productive. It is a constant game of tug-o-war.
Lounge is a great starting place and the Discord servers are mostly unofficial. I think I am really just clinging to how social the old forums used to be. Now things feel way more cold. Half of the posts are just stack-overflow esque Q&As.
I can think of a few solutions to this but it would require modification of the discourse software. Some kind of filter/tag system and/or different thread channels to distinguish serious inquiries from non-immediate things. I didn’t expect it to be an easy fix or easy balance.
This convo has strayed a little bit off from OP but I do feel like it reaches a sentiment of those who don’t like seeing such posts getting flagged and highlights the core concerns of which they may come from.
Oops, I forgot about that part.
The most unhealthy thing about modern culture is being able to easily control how much exposure something gets based on your opinion of it.
Everyone is given power, and they abuse it, imposing their narrow-mindedness on the world.
And even though the particular system on this site is regulated by moderators, it’s not like moderators are not equally falliable. A moderator is likely to endorse a mis-flagging of a post for the same reasons the post was mis-flagged by so many people in the first place.
In my experience, the only way moderation in a community can work as intended is if the admin adheres fanatically to their principles and forces their moderators to do the same; but such admins are few and far between because of monkey-brain bias; automatically taking the side of people you know well, and compulsively acting against things that trigger a negative emotional response. And no user moderation other than reporting of course, because someone not directly endorsed by the admin should have no power, average people prove time and time again that they are incapable of not trying to control others with their emotions.
When I pick moderators, I like to pick those who I’ve seen not react negatively to negative stimuli. I assume they’re smart enough to know when something’s definitely not allowed, but I’ve seen that they have no knee-jerk reaction so I can trust them to not be a tyrant in my absence.
Some months ago Discourse changed to a flagging system where it takes into account the score of the reporter when deciding when to hide a post due to flags, rather than needing an absolute number to hide it. This is pretty bad for large communities like this one because now a post can be hidden with just 2 people flagging it. We’re apparently already running the least strict setting we can here and it still allows 2 flags to completely hide a post, so we need to do something custom to prevent this.
It’s in the backlog to add a plugin that reverses it to the old situation. That way it can be set such that it needs a higher flag threshold (i.e. 5+ different users) before a post is hidden. This will take a bit of time though.
While I think for a larger community, 2 flags is way too low, I think that reporter score flag thresholds is a good way to ensure that newer users who don’t know the intricacies of DevForum moderation need more people to hide a post. The flags should still get looked at, but it prevents unintentional misuse of the flag system from a lack of experience.
Yeah, we are probably going to end up just making a small plugin that allows us to divide the flag score formula by some value X, where 2 <= X <= 5 or so, and just play with that value until we only really see posts being hidden that should be urgently hidden.