the Flag button and how it works

Eric Chadwick

Flag: Spam

• Subtracts 1 from a post's score.
• Removes 1 point from the author's overall score.
• Posts with -5 points are automatically removed for moderation (in Spam Queue).

Flag: Abuse

• Subtracts 1 from a post's score.
• Removes 1 point from the author's overall score.
• Posts with -5 points are flagged for moderation (in Moderation Queue).
• Posts with -10 points are automatically removed for moderation (in Moderation Queue).

Flag: Report

• You can send a message about a particular post to the moderators (in Reported Posts).
• Use the Report button:
• If you want your own post deleted. If you have multiple duplicates, you only need to Report one of them.
• If you see something that a moderator should be aware of, but it's not Spam nor Abuse.

Points

• Points are shown in your Profile.
• Points are applied towards your Rank.
• You can earn points for various things:
• +1 when your post gets a + Reaction.
• +2 when your post is Frontpaged.
• +? when you earn a Badge (coming soon!).
  
• +? when your work is featured in the Banner (coming soon-ish!)
• You can lose points for a couple reasons:
• -1 when your post is flagged by another user as Spam or Abuse. A moderator can reverse this if unwarranted, just contact us for a review.
• -5 when your post is flagged by a moderator as Spam.

GhostDetector

Could you define what counts as spam and abuse?

Eric Chadwick

Spam is anything which looks like someone selling something that's not related to the topic at hand, or posting nonsense commentary and they have a link in their signature that goes to a dubious website selling something.

Abuse would be someone posting something inflammatory, trolling, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

These seem kind of self-explanatory I guess. Once something comes to our attention then it's up to us moderators to decide if it really is spam or abuse, and deal with it as needed.

Tekoppar

Is there any protection to prevent this from getting abused? I'm talking about the -10 point abuse thing, do moderators still see it in their queue but the post is just deleted or do the post get completely deleted?  The latter seems really easy to abuse. -5 points simply means one of the moderators will look it over or does it mean the post gets removed?

Eric Chadwick

There hasn't been a case of it being used yet. If it does happen, you can let us know. We can see the full history of all edits on the site, so we can bring anything back if we disagree about the edit.

PyrZern

Welp, time to test this out.  Lemme flag all Eric's posts in this thread as SPAM cuz they should be included as part of FAQ anyhow.

Eric Chadwick

Good luck with this.

Eric Chadwick

@Tekoppar I should mention that to automatically delete a post via the Flag>Abuse button, it would require 10 different people pressing the button. This many "votes" has never happened yet, at least that I've been aware of.

5 button presses by 5 different people will remove the post from public display, into a moderator-only subforum. This is extremely rare. But just like with the Spam Queue, we check this periodically, clear out any false positives, or deal with anything that's clearly a problem.

If a post turns out to be truly abusive, the author will get a private warning explaining why this is a bad thing, and we may also edit their post or close the thread. Repeat offenders are banned.

Tekoppar

@Eric Chadwick I would say one reason might be because people probably didn't know what they did exactly until this post. The reason I'm asking is because an old forum used to have a reputation system to encourage good posts. The issue was that they also allowed negative reputation. Which meant if you disagreed with certain groups they would bombard your posts with negative reputation.

I mean it wouldn't be to hard right now for someone to create 10 accounts and do 10 abuse on posts all over the place, especially old posts that people might not read that often anymore. This could mean that someone could drastically change old discussions.

Eric Chadwick

That is certainly possible. It has never been done here. But yes, any time we give members the ability to do things, there is the potential for abuse. Moderator awareness helps. Community policing helps.

Besides the limited capability of the Spam/Abuse buttons, we have no reputation-points system here, and we have no plans to add it either.

Tekoppar

@Eric Chadwick the point with bringing up the reputation system was that people will always abuse systems that don't punish them for it. Maybe make it so you guys can get a list of posts that got deleted that way. At least that would prevent trolls from destroying discussions.

Eric Chadwick

Point me to any destroyed discussion you know of. 

Tekoppar

The point wasn't that it has been, but know that we know what the abuse button does. The point is that it could be used for destroying things and none would know. Right know I could create 10 accounts, find a thread with good information and abuse some posts and no one would really ever know.

PolyHertz

Eric Chadwick said:

We can see the full history of all edits on the site, so we can bring anything back if we disagree about the edit.

Always wondered; I'm a habitual editor, and often edit my posts anytime I see anything even slightly wrong (often multiple times). Does this kind of thing cause any problems for you guys (mods/admins) ?

Eric Chadwick

Nope.

Eric Chadwick

@Tekoppar said:

The point wasn't that it has been, but know that we know what the abuse button does. The point is that it could be used for destroying things and none would know. Right know I could create 10 accounts, find a thread with good information and abuse some posts and no one would really ever know.

I've corrected how this works, see the first post for details. No trolling can be done, at least nothing permament.