“Your post was flagged by the community.”
Uh huh, right. They make it sound like it’s some sort of community consensus, but they don’t tell you how many members of the community objected. One per cent? Five per cent? Or is it just one person?
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This is the moderation system Discourse uses, and I think it works pretty well. If you’re unhappy with it that’s fine but it’s not going to change. One of the asks in this thread was for more transparency and I was clear about why I edited Jason’s post. There were already two staff notices on that thread asking for people to stay on topic.
As moderators we try to moderate discussions and keep them from doing things like gaining negative momentum (happens all the time on the internet) or becoming unconstructive.
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I always presumed it is one person who flags.
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But it would be difficult for it to generate a parallel discussion if it has been hidden.
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True. If an off-topic message is killed too quickly, the tangential discussion might never happen.
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Going off-topic is one of my great joys in life
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This is probably the safest discussion of any within this forum from which to go off-topic. 
Let’s see what might be of interest today … Library of Congress: Today in History - February 12 …
There’s a chromolithograph on that page by Thomas Moran, “The Great Blue Spring of the Lower geyser basin, yellowstone”. What might be living in that water from the hot spring?
If this gets split off to a new topic for being off-topic, perhaps it could be called “What do you think might be living in that water?”
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I’m debating about what rating of insulation to install in my attic. Any advice? (Joking)
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Please do check that insulation, and bring a phone or camera along so that if any creatures have taken residence up there, you can add them to your iNaturalist observations.
(Only half joking)
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As I can hear someone skittering across the ceiling now…
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I think it’s someone up there about to plant a flag on my post.
(75% joking)
Is it possible to configure the effect of flagging, so that it takes more off-topic flags to cause a post to be hidden, than it takes other forms of flags? Going off-topic seems more benign than, say, writing an offensive post.
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Pre flag warning to topic maybe? I’m not sure if off topic flags can be moderators alone, or if it takes at least one forum member to start it.
It does seem to ruffle feathers here and there
I have to admit whenever a post is hidden my curiosity rivals my cat’s… what was said? Oh boy!
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The trust level status of the user(s) who placed the flag(s) does play a role in what happens. From the link provided in post 13 of this discussion:
Multiple flag actions
If a post receives multiple flags before staff handles it:
- The post is immediately hidden if “enough” users flag it (e.g., 3 Trust Level 1 users or 2 Trust Level 2 users).
So there is already a weighting system for flags. Maybe Discourse enables it to be further configured in various ways.
I’m worried that if I’m hit with another flag, they’ll take away some of my badges.
Rather than taking any away, they should upgrade this one to “Overenthusiast”:
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More transparency is a good thing, and yes, it was one of the asks in the post. I’m just saying that in some ways, it feels like there is a disincentive to compile my responses to several posts into one reply post; if I post each one as I write it, then I can honestly say that I posted them before being notified of the staff asking to stay on (the more narrowly defined) topic – I had not yet scrolled far enough to see the notice.
The problem is that they would not be treated with any more leeway if I did that. They would still be moderated the same as my replies to posts that were made after the notice from staff. This would, if anything, increase the sense of unfairness. This was what I meant by saying that it feels like moving the goalposts.
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I think it would be best practice in any forum/medium to read an entire conversation before posting responses. If someone wishes to write responses as they read, that’s of course their prerogative - but they do risk those responses being irrelevant to the continued conversation, covered by other users, etc.
For instance, I am a scientist. If I only read the literature about a given subject until 2015, base my research on that, and then write up my work to submit without reading/referencing the literature from 2015-2025, the article would be returned to me without consideration for publication because I hadn’t made the effort to make sure that my work reflected the state of other researchers’ work. My submitted work would also likely not be very relevant/useful and might even be outright wrong/incorrect. That’s not the reviewers’ or the publishers’ fault (the other participants in the conversation) - it’s the result of a non-optimal decision that I would have made. It’s also not “moving the goalposts” - the goalposts were one thing in 2015, they’re another thing now, and they’ll be another thing in 2030.
The state of any conversation changes through time - this is just a reality that all participants have to deal with. If I’m at a party chatting with a group of friends, and someone sticks their head in and says that they overheard what we were talking about 20 minutes ago and shares their thoughts on that topic, it’s possible that they’ll be sharing a great thought and people will want to return to that element of the conversation. But it’s more likely that there will be some confusion or blank stares and even annoyance because the conversation has likely moved on somewhat. The group of people at the party didn’t move any goalposts - the conversation just moved on. What would have been a relevant thought/response 20 minutes ago is no longer one.
On a forum, if someone wants to write responses as they read a thread, they can do so and wait to post until they get to the end of the thread. When they do so, they can reread their thoughts to make sure that they are still relevant, on-topic, etc. If not, they can delete them, send them to someone in a message instead of posting in the thread, or something else that they prefer.
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But isn’t that a sign they’re going off-topic? ;-)
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I hear you, and thanks for the honest and thoughtful reply. And one option would have been to hide all the earlier stuff that was getting into the realm of topics that I didn’t think were healthy or relevant to the conversation and forum so that there wouldln’t have been something to quote and weigh in on there. But despite what people may think I really don’t like hiding or editing posts, and I think in general we moderate things pretty lightly here, so I left them up and added some posts with staff colors that asked people to keep to a narrowly-defined topic. Maybe actually hiding more would be better for those situations? Tough to say and we definitely won’t always get things right.
But, one thing I feel is pretty important is to try and keep the site focused on iNat and nature-related things because unfortunately political discussion and similarly heated topics can go south very quickly online and iNat also doesn’t have any business hosting those discussions. It’s truly great that people have found a community here and I think that makes us want to discuss these important things with the people we’ve come to know here, but we’re just not the space for those kinds of discussions. And the more time I spend moderating here, the less time I have to interface with our team and file bug reports or potentional improvements for them to consider and implement.
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And it happened again! Three, count 'em three posts in the “harmful animals” thread that were about fishes being maintained in captivity, and guess what? In stead of moving all three to the existing thread that is on that topic – ONLY ONE was flagged as “off-topic.”