When we migrated to Discourse, I’m sure most of you read up on what flags did on Discourse (and if you didn’t, that’s cool too because you’re about to find out what they do). Flagging + automatic post removal is supposed to help keep the forums polite and clean, but that only happening once they’ve gotten 3 flags of a kind really doesn’t incentivize people to flag inappropriate posts. It’s easy to think: “What’s the point of flagging this if it doesn’t get 3 flags?”, and as a result posts aren’t flagged unless the post is seriously bad or some other edge case.
That’s not entirely how flagging works though. On a thread I made on the Discourse Meta, I learned that even 1 flag will do something. Posts with one active flag will go into a review pile for admins, which they can then read and delete. Because the forum admins review posts with even one flag:
(codinghorror is one of the founders of Discourse if you didn’t know)
If you ever see a post that you would normally flag but aren’t going to because you don’t think it’ll get 3 flags, flag it anyway. The staff will see it pop up in the moderation queue and can act on it from there.
