The abuse of flagging needs to stop

This entire thread
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/my-poor-experience-with-moderation-on-the-devforum-and-how-it-can-improve/2316864

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I don’t agree with it, however they most likely thought that response was calling someone out for misinformation or something?

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Yep, I made that topic. I can say with almost extreme certainty that most of my moderation actions are from flags. There’s little to no reason a moderator would pursue some of them on their own, especially for how much of a stretch them being removed is. I seriously think the whole process can be boiled down to this:
Someone flags appropriate topic/post > Moderator reads topic/post without taking in context and details > Moderator removes it even if it complies with rules

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This one was uncalled for It was about development cause I wanted to know if other people are able to do this so that I may know in the future if i could use such and obviously people abuse the flags yet again and the moderation is not checking the context of such

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Usually it’s the same mod or two that always follow through with ridiculous flags, often with zero context as mentioned earlier.

And I’m sure plenty of us know them by name.

This is an interesting perspective but I think is the wrong outcome. I do understand how you go there.

Flags are ultimately the way the community can say I think this is against the rules, please review. Limiting that ability I believe is more damaging and wouldn’t solve the root problem I see here.

I see a few keys points on what’s not quite right:

  • A lack of clarity on the difference between feedback notices and strikes (entirely valid)
  • The moderation tooling not allowing enough context
  • The specifics of any one rule as well as specifics of any category’s use is not quite right
  • The messaging used when feedback messages are given is not giving the best message

With that out of the way some context, I’ve been on the forum for many years and personally met many of the people behind the forums, including some of the folks moderating this forum, I can absolutely confirm they’re human and lovely people.

If there’s anything I’ve learnt from Post Approval (approving bugs, feature requests, moving threads around) is that having pre-written statements is so much faster and allows for automation to make things quicker. The same is the case for the mod team and makes flag to action much lower as a result.

Moderation at scale means that mistakes will be made, but that means that users also have to understand that and go through the appeals process; which appears to be been made more clearer.

DevRel is the final word and authority on what’s within the rules on the forums, so as forum users we should ultimately leave it to them to inform users of any issues.

In past years users openly mini-modded and replied to threads telling them to move it to another category, I saw this behaviour and made Reduce Mini-modding on the DevForums to deal with this problem which ultimately led to global rule 3.1 being a thing but as I said in that thread I think there’s value in privately informing folks as nothing more as a nice heads up, much of the content of that thread is still a helpful read today.

DevRel does deal with mass flaggers and malicious flaggers, I have seen people get strikes for it and someone from DevRel messaged me about ~80 flags I did on one post, we ended up having a discussion and all was agreed to in the end.


In the end, flags are just the community way of saying I think something should be done about this thread. Feedback notices from DevRel are simply informing you of feedback and that it’s a way to adapt and ensure you don’t break the rules. You need to appeal when mistakes happen.

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mmmmmmmmmm I love it when roblox moderation removes my conversation with individual in this post

YET THEY DONT CARE ABOUT LITERALLY NSFW ON THEIR PLATFORM SHAME!

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Apparently complaining about age recommendations and then linking similar games of the same genre counts as a “callout” and my post was removed from “community flags”…

90% of the time I post I get removed from someone flagging my post for whatever reason. It’s impossible to say anything on this forum anymore.

Most threads are just people back and forth arguing which makes every topic useless to read anyways yet nobody seems to flag those.

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The appeal link they send in the message brings you to the Roblox support page off of the forum and on the main site. Completely useless.

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If you think using Roblox’s standard appeal process is the wrong path feel free to supporting existing forum feature requests or create your own, providing your use cases as with every feature request.

You can also communicate with DevRel to better understand why these posts are taken down and if there is anything you can do to adjust your tone and wording. Feel free to flag threads you think violate the rules, reviewing them once in a while may provide some guidance.

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The problem is they care so much about little but when someone says something actually concerning its quite rude this has been up for like 4 weeks and Im quite offended

prude | pruːd |
noun
a person who is or claims to be easily shocked by matters relating to sex or nudity

I guess we could see that the moderator thought this was another one of those “Does this break tos???1!1!1!!!1” posts.


I doubt the mods know what that word means lol.

True, I feel like people (not trying to target a specific group) get information from the title. I have seen MANY and i mean MANY posts that get taken down yet it abides all the rules.

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Pretty sure those aren’t private categories.

Yep, they are. I don’t know how I can show proof- but I remember which post I posted those to, and it was Dev Discussion.

Here’s the links:

Post 1: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/roblox-staff-should-fix-their-communication-to-developers/2390892
Post 2: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/what-do-you-all-miss-about-roblox/2302590/182

Any categories with locks next to to then are private. The o Lu private ones I know of are #development-discussion, #forum-help:forum-questions and #lounge

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You shouldn’t be talking like this here anyway, take that junk to reddit and twitter instead. Don’t soil where you sleep, etc; this is where we go to get problems solved. Go elsewhere for crude language and bad jokes.

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I’ve seen people use way worse language, along with it wasn’t intended to be a joke.

Even if it’s not appropriate for the Dev Forum, it doesn’t make the flag any more real.

Finally, Dev Discussion is more of a off topic category compared to something like Scripting Support, so I don’t see how it was inappropriate. Dev discussion isn’t made for help developing.

It’s only seen as an off-topic category because it’s frequently used incorrectly

I just meant off-topic of developing support