Yo, after a certain amount of community flags, can a thread just be permanently locked down? It’s confusing to scroll through a controversial thread, only to have the flow of the discussion interrupted by,“this thread has been temporarily locked due to a high amount of community flags.”
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Honestly, I think there should be some topics that should be locked the moment they are started as sensible discussion goes out of the window fairly swiftly… OR they should be moderated with a hefty banstik for people making personal attacks and generally being nincompoops.
Huntsman Ult,
Ranged Meta
Beamstaff Pyro
WHC Ult cooldown,
Red Dupes/Bad Luck protection
to name ones off the top of my head that goes south fast.
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Probably not permanently, but after the third or so automatic lockdown a longer period (12, 24 hours?) would be useful, just to calm down the “conversation” more and give time for Hedge or others to actually deal with the flags.
This would jut kill any useful conversation and debate about the topics too. Not to mention the amount of other stuff that would likely go out the window with automatic bans of this kind. And the amount of crap getting flinged at FS if certain not-inherently-bad (in legal, forum rules or just good taste sense) topics were banned. Better to just stick to regular forum moderation.
That said, I believe on a bad day Hedge (and now, Julia) could likely need some additional help to deal with everything. Any controversial topic collects opinions on both sides, and more or less sensible, quite fast, and when the flags start flying they fly fast too. On the amount of dozens in a few hours. I may or may not have seen more than a hundred new posts in a topic after a night’s sleep…
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I can concede a couple of things. Rather than permanently locking down a thread, they should extend the lockdown period after a certain threshold of flags is met.
Its just annoying to browse a thread then see a bunch of, "this thread has been temporarily locked due to a high amount of community flags.” x1000
It breaks the flow of the discussion, and makes it confusing for me to follow along.
I think there is an auto-moderation lock down of 4 hours when there are a certain number of flags on a thread (requiring multiple users to flag the posts). Those flags then need to be manually cleared by a moderator – which there only seems to be one on this entire forum (Hedge). This is a pretty common, free forum platform and I’ve run into this issue myself working on other websites.
So on my post specifically, it has the requisite number of flags to trigger a lock down. It closes for four hours, re-opens but the flags haven’t been cleared, and then it closes again.
If anything, this is a telling example of how little actual moderation there is on this forum. You can actually see how long it takes the mods to check these forums based on how long the flags remain uncleared, which looks like it’s at least 4-5 days right now.
The real solution would be to remove the auto-moderation feature and either (i) add partial moderator control to the original poster or (ii) appoint community mods who can actually moderate. Right now, there’s no one steering the ship except bots. More bots wouldn’t really help and just a couple people could then lock down a thread whenever they felt like it.
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This sounds like a sound idea, make certain users moderators. At least this should help with the stupid flags that ruin the thread.
There are mods, it’s not just Hedge and he isn’t gone for 4-5 days. There’s actually a list of mods and admins around here somewhere. But he is obviously clearing the flags from threads. In the most recent “Beam OP” thread, you can even see that people could respond in between all the locks. Only to have the thread locked again after they commented due to more flags being submitted. This isn’t a moderation issue, this is an issue with the community being so toxic and childish.
Also, if I remember correctly, there is a permission system built into these forums. I think you have to have a certain amount of badges and be on the website for certain amount of time, as well as other things, and you automatically get increased permissions. That’s why you will see users with different levels of permissions, from Basic User, to Member or w/e the different levels are called.
Also, you can actually track the exact time he was last online and the last time he posted, which was 2 hours ago when he posted and 47 mins ago he was last browsing the forums.
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