This post …
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-jokes/848629/8385
What was it that gave cause for concern. Looked innocent enough to me.
You might want to take a look at the new poster’s amended title.
CobaltBlade75
BANNED AI poster
Also, your best bet usually is to pm a moderator directly.
Better yet use @moderators to PM all of us.
Just PMing a single moderator is not always productive.
Yes, I saw they were banned .. but why ?
Why was that post in the jokes thread flagged, @moderators ?
I looked at their other posts and saw nothing untoward.
ETA, while composing this post, a message appears in the preview pane
saying “You cannot mention group @moderators.”, but it seems to allow it ..?
If you read all the posts by that poster, they were all “off”, and the context was wrong. It read like an AI, and it was an AI.
I will mention that a fair number of posters spotted the abnormal activity and flagged the poster, out of an abundance of caution if nothing else.
It wasn’t the moderators who were first on the case as it were.
It was an AI.
Clear when reviewing their posts, not as clear from 1 or 2 posts.
What @needscoffee said.
I continue to hate that posts can be made invisible by multiple reports. I’d get hiding it behind a clickthrough, but the post itself should remain viewable until mods decide.
(Also I just hate that I can’t see if I’d be able to tell, lol.)
A lot of the posts commented on things that have been overtaken by current events. It was like someone posting from 2025. Someone is having AI post innocuous and friendly things in preparation for a (probably political) influence campaign by a troll farm. Thanks, Elon!
There are still other of its posts that are visible.
Discourse isn’t designed for boards like ours, with a dedicated mod team. It’s designed for folks who want to put up a message board without actually maintaining it, so that it’ll collapse into horribleness relatively slowly.
That said, we do get to reports fairly quickly, so it’s rare that a post actually does get hidden due to a high number of flags, and on the rare occasion that it happens, it’s almost always justified. And in the rare-upon-rare situation where it happens but isn’t justified, we just restore it.