I’ve just joined the forum a few days ago to post a tech question. The thread was immediately hijacked by someone making kneejerk replies, making assumptions about what iI should be spending my money on or what my budget for tech should be, that I want to share internet from my PC to cheat in video games, etc. I wanted to ask a moderator to talk to this person and/or remove their posts from the thread, but it’s impossible to do so. First of all the UI makes it difficult to find out who the moderators are. Then… there’s simply no way to contact them. On top of this the FAQ says people should “flag the posts” but there’s no option to do so that I can find. And finally it seems like you seem to expect that abusive posts will be flagged multiple times, and then it will be on your radar - but that’s not how abusive behavior works in communities. Usually few people even care if mud is being thrown at someone else instead of them, never mind caring enough to report it.
This is pretty bad, as it creates an easy path to abuse going completely unanswered, and unless this changes I will probably not be returning to the forum. If you’re like “so what, you’re just one person” - I’m probably not the only person experiencing this.
It feels like the forum UX is built so that the moderators are engaged as little as possible, which is not good, because that doesn’t make for an unproblematic forum, just a forum where bad behavior isn’t under control. If you feel like moderators would be overrun with reports of bad community behavior, you need to hire more moderators, not make moderators harder to reach.
Discourse bot will do a whisper/DM at you and if you follow the thread and do as the bot tells you, you get to know the features and where the buttons are.
This is how the internet works but despite this, people usually are generally relatively well behaved here compared elsewhere and compared to other platforms.
You have to elaborate on your postings to reduce this occurrence from happening. I also find that good formatting, effort to do correct spelling mistakes and generally being to the point helps a lot.
The moderators aren’t responsible for the UX of this - that would be the Discourse developers (the one who actually wrote the forum software). The moderators doesn’t have much of a say in the implementation of this particular forum - that would be the site owner. We also don’t want to engage the moderators all the time because they are volunteers who don’t get paid and just do this out of the goodness of their heart. This isn’t really customer service, unfortunately.
I’ve been here a few years and the forum is nice enough as it is. Again, people are generally well behaved. It helps if you will actually link the link post in question.
It also helps if your username doesnt say cheater, as a new account, you will be judged from a lot of things, among others a choice for usernames. Anyway, I have just seen the related post. This is just how older people post I guess. I did not find anything particularly offensive in his initial reply, you were the one that initially became hostile and demanded him to stay on topic, functionally telling him to shut up and answer, interrogation style.
Ok. now I am just shaking my head. There are a lot of intelligent nerds here, far smarter than both of us and they can smell if something is up too. You are after all, asking for their help. I am just asking for your patience and extend kindness to others. If you are not going to stay here for the long haul, I can understand too.
If this can be changed without hacking Discourse, that would be a reasonable change IMO (to never use •••, or only under the most extreme small window size). Hiding 2 things with one thing is silly.
thanks for letting me know. i had no idea this was third party software. I hadn’t seen any branding anywhere. forum software usually has some form of “powered by …” or “zBulletinBBS v x.y” somewhere.
sorry, no caps bc of rsi today.
doing @/moderators in the thread is usually something that ends up being inflammatory and makes the trolling intensify. on the other hand, clicking the flag feels like it may or may not get answered, and probably won’t. and it’s something that has no workflow associated to it, as in, there’s no feedback, no way to find out the status of the report, etc. kind of a “forget about it” situation. and it also feels like action won’t be taken until multiple people flag something, but obviously that’s an assumption based on other systems that have a “flag” feature. sooo… how can i contact the mods, to tell them exactly what’s wrong? if discourse doesn’t allow this feature, maybe an email address would be a good idea, or something like that.
rapid hitting report is probably better than not being able to find report at all. however, i don’t even get to see the three dots. i only see the heart, link icon, and a bookmark icon, and the reply function. that’s all. maybe that’s because i’m a new user. but if new users can’t report posts, then that’s a terrible onboarding experience, because eventually trolls realize that this widely used system that’s used in other forums defaults to a situation where they can harass new users and the mods won’t even find out.
I’ve hit the flag on occasions and mods came in pretty quickly. If the offender is obviously abusing you then I’m sure there will be a response, if not then maybe it could be a case of overreaction on your part. Although I note that in your example it’s pretty clear that the other users are the asshole.
We must respond to the flag or the mods get pestered with notifications until we do. So it absolutely must be responded to.
As for the workflow, you will get a response in your DMs as closure/progress on the flag instance.
It’s not perfect, but it works well on the moderator side. And I believe it’s designed to discourage forum members from dwelling on the thing they flagged, because that can create a negative mindset.
When you flag a post, all moderators get a notification. Once any one of them acknowledges the flag, it will spawn a message with you where you can have a dialogue with them. I understand that you’re new to the platform, but the process is honestly the opposite of what you’re describing here.
Thanks. I know that now, now that you’ve mentioned it to me, but it’s not what one would expect from flagging a message. EG if you flag a message on twitter, instagram, facebook, or reddit, most often there’s no action at all taken. So other people will have the same expectation as me.
However, that does not help either way, because I simply don’t have a flag to click on. It is not there.
now that we’re here, maybe one of the mods /could/ look into the thread, by the way? and possibly clean it up… it probably could use all the replies deleted (including mine because at that point a lone “please stay on topic” doesnt make sense)
also, i don’t think the flag needs to be unhidden from the overflow menu. i think the issue here is that i don’t have it at all. i would have found it in the overflow menu, it just isn’t there, so there’s no overflow menu. i do get the overflow menu on my own posts, and that hides the bookmark and delete icons.
I can’t control users prejudice based on other platforms, but I do understand your concern. The best I can do is assure you that we take issues seriously.
I’ll have a look at the thread when I get a moment.
This is going to take some deeper investigation. I didn’t realize that you didn’t have the flag feature at all.
@moderators can someone please do something with the thread in question. (the only other thread that I created). The trolls keep derailing it, and won’t go away after being given multiple hints. Can someone please just delete all replies, including mine. There have been zero on-topic replies.
