While I strongly agree with all eight points @Steve_Everett made in his original post here, they are somewhat abstract. I.e., while they are concise in language and meaning (in contrast to Jolla’s / Discourse’s FAQ / forum guidelines), the do not address the processes to be implemented (the “doing”).
Furthermore, since you posted that list, a couple of other aspects became obvious, e.g., that this Discourse instance is hosted and administrated (but not moderated) by Discourse Inc., that its configuration apparently is Discourse’s default configuration and Jolla does not know what configuration options exist, that Jolla just copied Discourse’s original FAQ with no changes, that Jolla likely bought this service to leverage Discource’s promise of being an almost-zero-moderation forum software etc., and that “hidden” posts (those being made invisible by flagging) are automatically erased after a while (if no moderator actively intervenes).
Taking these aspects into account, it seems unlikely to convince Jolla to invest a lot or time and efforts into handling FSO.
In contrast to that, your points 4 to 7 require Jolla to permanently invest much more time into moderation tasks, while your point 2 is asking Jolla to write their own, concise FAQ.
Still point 8 is a nice reminder, what our common goal ought to be.
Hence I pondered about how to address your points 1 and 3 with minimal (and one-shot, but not permanent) efforts by Jolla. This should also be in Jolla’s best interest, as the ongoing conflicts and flaggings at FSO do require more and more moderation efforts; I do not believe this to become less tedious for Jolla again, without some structural changes.
Thus I suggest two simple measures to alleviate the “censorship issue”
- (Technically): Switch off the real censoring (rsp. request the maintainers of Jolla’s Discourse instance to do that), i.e., the auto-erasing of posts after they have been hidden for weeks. Simply leave them permanently in the “hidden” state (i.e., that they still can be made visible per click). Moderators always can opt to manually erase posts.
Then the statement “there is no censorship at FSO, because the posts can be seen with a single click” becomes sustainably true, still eventually flagged posts cannot be seen without explicit user interaction (the single click).
This would make people call for a moderator far less often (from both sides, either by addressing them or by flagging posts) IMO. - (Policy / Guidance): Significantly tone down the “do flag quickly”-policy described in the FAQ, because that apparently triggers the aforementioned “secret forum police” mindset exposed by some. Flagging should be described to be primarily used for obvious cases of spam and “ad hominem” attacks (e.g., “you asshole”, “an idiot like you”), but explicitly not for statements or opinions one simply does not like.
P.S.: I believe that these two, small changes basically eliminate the “censorship issue”. Although I would prefer clear, proper rules / terms & conditions, clear no-gos (i.e., spam, “ad hominem” attacks, but not (much) more) etc., this might really not be worth the effort if a practically working solution can be attained by aforementioned two measures.