Yesterday I got a response from Colibri in my notifications about a post I’d flagged for moderation. It’s the first time I’ve received that notification, but when I did some digging and went to my messages folder for the first time I noticed a bunch of them.
Is this super annoying for the mods? Do you guys have to paste a form response every time you resolve a flagged post?
Here’s a bonus question: is it impossible to delete private messages? The only thing I was able to do was send them to an archive.
When you flag a post, we have the option to either Agree or Disagree with the flag. There are a few other options, but that’s the basics of it. When we resolve the flag by clicking either Agree or Disagree, the form letter is automatically generated.
Personally I think the form letter response is kinda stupid, but that’s the way that the Discourse flag system works, so whatever. Since the form letter is automatically generated, we’re not doing any copying and pasting or anything like that, so it’s not really an annoyance to us. There isn’t even any indication on our screens that the letter is being generated, though we can see it in our moderator message queues.
As far as private messages are concerned, unfortunately your only option is to archive them. I hope that they add a feature to delete them at some point, but for now that’s all we have.
In all honesty I haven’t paid much attention to what the form letters say for each case, but here is the explanation that Discourse has for the Agree and Disagree options:
That’s not a bad thing. You aren’t penalized in any way for flags that we disagree with.
Sometimes we will disagree with a flag even though there is an issue, perhaps because we were busy and too much time has passed and the thread has moved on, or perhaps we feel that it’s a minor issue and we don’t want to disrupt the thread by focusing on it.
Don’t take it personally, and don’t be afraid to flag something even if you aren’t sure if it’s an issue. We would rather have too many reports than not enough.
