I just made a blog post about this here: https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/25983-hiding-comments-on-inaturalist
But basically, following up on this discussion, we’ve introduced a hiding comments functionality on observation pages, and it’s now live. So curators will now not be able to delete comments on observations, but they can hide them. iNat staff can unhide them or possibly delete them if necessary.
It would be good to get some feedback about this. I know having the ability to hide (and not delete) comments on flags was also requested, but let’s see how this goes first. Here’s an example you can check out: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/26811289
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Normal users see “Content Hidden”, which makes it seem as if some random user might have hidden it. So we may get questions like “How do I hide comments?” or “Why are people allowed to hide their comments?”.
Suggested change: “Content hidden by a curator. More info.” and link “More info” to the blog post.
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I agree, but also I find the entire ‘content hidden’ message a bit prickly. Once hidden it becomes a private matter between the curators, the person whose message was hidden and (if applicable) the person who flagged the content. So let those 3 parties see the ‘content hidden’ message and let the rest of us see nothing as it’s not really our business anymore.
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The pop-up over the “banner” says who hid it and why, so that seems sufficient to me, but looks like only IDs have this banner. Hidden comments don’t have the explanatory banner.
It’s preferable to me to have some indication that there was a comment there:
- A visible indicator of a hidden comment can provide context to discussions. For example, in this observation there is no indication that jimjohnson’s comment is in response to anything.
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otherwise we are left with a weird conversation where one person seems to be arguing both sides.
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