Currently, users of the Developer Forum are able to flag withdrawn posts (posts pending for removal).
This is abused alot on my personal experience, and I am wondering why this is even possible.
In my opinion, posts that are withdrawn should not have the ability to be flagged. Some annoying people flag these posts for no actual reason, which freezes the post from being automatically deleted after 1 hour.
If Discourse doesn’t have the ability to implement this, the forum staff should send a feedback message to people who do this instead.
This topic for example. It’s created 5 hours ago, and has only 1 edit (because of the automatic withdrawn message). This topic was probably created as a mistake, and immediately removed after creation.
If the topic or post is removed immediately after creation, there is no way that anyone was able to see any rule-violating content. Normal users of the Developer Forum are unable to see the edit history of posts, so I don’t really agree with your point.
This feature exists for a very good reason, it’s to make sure rulebreakers can’t get away with breaking the rules by just deleting the post. It shouldn’t be removed.
But DevRel did not fork Discourse. They have customized it using the configuration settings Discourse provides. If this were a fork then DevRel could go crazy with feature requests and add whatever the community wants. That said this should honestly be considered, considering this community is very unique and we honestly have specific needs.
