- You cannot see a post being “mass flagged”, because:
- The flag count is not visible anywhere.
- After the third flag in the same flag-category (the number can be lower, that depends on some other factors) one cannot flag that post any more: Consequently posts in Discourse can never be “mass flagged”.
- For some categories of flagging, the author of a post is provided with a single chance to alter the post: After that it takes less than three flaggings if the same flag-category to irreversibly “hide” the post, which ultimately becomes auto-deleted after a couple of weeks.
- While there sure is a inverse correlation between likes and flags, there are “hidden"→"deleted” posts which had more than “a few” likes (i.e., ≥ 6). Though I presume opinions what exactly constitutes a “strong (inverse) correlation” and “a few” differ greatly.
- All this is irrelevant, because Discourse’s flagging mechanisms do not at all take likes into account and there is no active forum moderation. Actually one principal reason for Jolla to choose a Discourse instance hosted by Discourse Inc. (precisely: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.) is likely the promise of “community self-moderation” and Jolla has even refrained from asking Discourse Inc. to adjust any default settings of the Discourse instance they pay for. Consequently, solely metrics evaluated by Discourse’s automatic mechanisms in their default settings matter.
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The reason for this is based on some different cases but almost similar:
- nazist party was elected, therefore the likes is not an absolute metric of good
- in a KKK forum a racist post will receive a lot of likes possibly few flags or none
- loving friends cannot be a metric to prevent that they being flagged
It is bare clear that the forum is not the only communication channel here. There are also IRC meetings - another wasteful of time, under my point of view - in which people build a false sense of friendship creating their own narrative.
How good is our Thor god? How bad are its enemies?
We share/agree about the answers, then we are friends!
That’s a kindergarten not a community! 
Solution?
All of this was pretty clear also in the ancient Greek in which people (citizens, not all) are used to meet under three circumstances:
- for doing business (market place);
- to have fun together (theater, music, alcool and orgies);
- to decide with democracy (those who do, decide).
You might consider the #3 the most important but it was the least important. Democratic decisions were often related to war (no negotiation) or peace (negotiation ok). Also in this case who were going in war are going to decide, all the others were not allowed to interfere in that decision.
Therefore: who do business decide how to do business, who partecipate to the orgy decide how to deal with other participates, who write the code decide what code write or not.
What are you looking for?
Here there is no business, there is no orgies and no one is producing code (or decent code).
Why the hell you are so focused in democracy and a supposed civil-way for opinion exchange? To talk about is pink color a trend? Or better to go with a lime green?
In fact, what are you secretly looking for is a way/tool to win an argument.
A tool that seems decent and civil but let you win also when you are totally wrong and messy.
I am sorry, never worked in that way and this is the reason because we never stop to do war in one way or another.
Panem et circensis
Moreover, the old way in which some people met in a place and kill each others with swords were the best way to settle down an issue (war) and also the less destructive one. That place took the name of Circus and the fighters gladiators, nowadays football players.
Panem et Circensis. When the bread is missing, the circus does not work either! 
Therefore, unless you are going to put a lot of bread on the table, there is no any need of a tool to distribute it or to help us to decide how to distribute it.
Are you going to put a lot of bread on the table or not? 
hmm, this is all getting pretty off track, in my opinion. a global perfect solution for moderation is out of scope.
the problem i’m discussing is quite narrow; i want to remove the disincentive for flagging, which is an objectively bad thing. threads should not be closed based on flags on posts, because it makes folks worry about flagging, which is dangerous.
This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
This topic was automatically opened after 4 hours.
Talking about wasting people’s time, in your first thread on this forum you were quite vehement in your opposition to Jolla’s use of Google as their default search engine.
I note with interest in the screenshots you provide here that you have Chrome installed on the device you used to browse the internet, and that the first tab contains a Google search.
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Every user is free to mute another user if someones posts annoys him. That should be enough ‘protection’.
On the other hand, the present system gives trolls and saboteurs the opportunity to seriously disturb the communication between users here.
Admin, please tune the parameters of the forum software!
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It is dangerous that people are pushed to think that they can flag or ban what they do not like. Flagging an awful (hate speech, racism, sexism, etc.) or unlawful content makes sense. Otherwise not. What about spam and OT? Considering how people are using the OT and spam flags in this forum, I would say that they are abusing that tool.
Let me explain with an example: proposing an alternative is not spamming. Proposing viagra, is spamming. The OT is even a blurrer definition. Writing about gardening flowers is clearly OT but it is completely harmless. The OT flag should compressed the post and put a label on it. This will suggest other people that they can safely skip it and they would not lose any relevant information about the topic (e.g. how to fix the GPS in XA2).
IMHO, this @Seven.of.nine answer is enough. However, there is something better that we can do about improving the forum users experience.
Another way to make a thread useful and at the same time let people express themselves is to promoting the posts which are technically useful. In such a way, we do not have to check and read 50 posts about fixing GPS in XA2 because the little-N most relevant posts are linked at the top of the thread.
As you can imagine, promoting useful content solves many problems. Moreover, it does not interfere with the speech freedom, and bring much more value. Stackoverflow, promotes the answers which people find useful. Just because this promotion, everything else is not even read by the most of the people which are only interested in the subject.
This approach also drops enormously the need of moderation, its effort and just those contents that are dangerous, awful, unlawful, real spam or scan win the flag or the ban. Promoting the useful contributes is much fairer and works way better than going around to flag or ban.
I am going to close this post with a suggestion:
- Asking yourself the right question is half of the work done
The right question is NOT which flag or ban policy is better.
The right question is how to promote the useful contents.
- The best at the top.
Can you see the value of this perspective change?
the only thing i see, for certain, is that closing threads because of flagged posts is harmful.
while the right approach to forum moderation is tricky and complicated, no member of this community deserves to read vulgar, hate-filled comments about their religion on a MOBILE OS FORUM. handling clear, objective hate speech it is an extremely low bar to clear, and obviously outweighs all concerns about ‘positive contributions’, and has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘attitude’. deciding what is and isnt hate speech CAN be hard, but it sure is NOT hard in this case.
so, that being the case, lets keep this thread focused on JUST this one easy to solve, clear cut, unambiguous problem. auto-closing threads is bad:
- it gives trolls the last word. folks who view a thread will see the hidden post as the last (and thus most prominent) post, and decide that this is a community filled with hate
- it DISCOURAGES users from flagging posts, which can cause hate speech to linger unhidden for longer than necessary and be read by more members of the community who will be hurt by it
- it hardly ever (never?) actually stops flamewars
- its so damn annoying to try and get work done or help someone, and actually be stopped because of a troll
@flypig is this one specific change, removing auto-hiding threads, possible? p.s.: thanks for raising the topic of moderation at the meeting i could not attend
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It might be. However, unless promoting the useful posts linking them at the top of the thread, every other policy - not matter how sophisticated is - will add no value.
For example, not closing a thread for a while, will let the trolls to start a flame-war on that thread. It will be end not much better but worse.
Believe me - I was in charge of moderating m-list and forum for decades, different kind of forum (e.g. “tutti nudi” forum, translation: “all naked”) and different kind of m-list (e.g. LUG Genova, with 200+ people subscribed) - unless we promote the best contents at the top, there is no any chance that moderation will do something useful.
Believe me - no any way apart promoting at the top useful contents will add value.
After decades of moderation, I know how trolling works much more than every troll you have ever seen here or elsewhere. If or when I wish to, I am the king of trolls!
thank you for this useful contribution. as far as i know, ordering by posts by quality is not a feature supported by discourse. assuming that is the case, it would require a different forum engine, and therefore is not ACTUALLY a useful contribution. much as i would love moving back to something like TJC, jolla is a small company that presumably lacks the resources to do so.
turning off auto-closing threads, however, takes THREE CLICKS by a forum moderator, and is therefore an achievable goal.
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i think you missed my point. the approach you describe may in fact work well, but unless it is a feature already supported by Discourse that can be enabled by clicking a button, it will simply never happen. jolla is not in the business of designing forum moderation software, no matter what any body building governators may say to the contrary
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Discourse can be customized. Jolla pay for that but did not used such opportunity. Moreover, if an idea is good, then Discourse can implement it, despite anyone pays for it or not because it is in their interest to provide a better product. It is hard, it is painful, but it works. 
Seriously… Some people must be new here. It used to be that technical discussions where at peak here, and technical contributions respected.
What I see lately is just noise around topics I didn’t want to hear about, diverging from the original post and not SFOS related at all and even so, written without any manner.
Yes, it’s a failure. But not of the community.
Yes, I’m looking at you, you wasting my energy to fix a next bug and instead writing this.
I chose to write instead, because I want to let anyone being held back from technical advancements to get the message that this is wasting our time.
I’ll stop and say no more:)
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Just to clarify a few things concerning the flagging of posts.
The forum software uses quite complex rules for this, but in general as long as there’s sufficient time for moderators to deal with flags, topics shouldn’t get auto-closed.
You can read about the exact conditions here:
Users who flag posts for valid reasons gain trust, while users who repeatedly and incorrectly flag posts lose trust. As a result, users who maliciously flag posts in order to cause a topic to be closed will ultimately find their flags carry less weight in future.
If you feel there is a valid reason to flag a post, you should feel comfortable doing so. Whether you’re posting or flagging, the FAQ is a great resource for understanding what constitutes acceptable, or unacceptable, behaviour.
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but threads get closed for legitimate flagging ALL THE TIME. it happened at least 6 times last week.
bear in mind, that is NOT what im referring to. i am ONLY talking about LEGITIMATE flagging of posts, resulting in closing threads. while you say that we SHOULD feel comfortable flagging, it is not the case that we CAN feel comfortable doing so, because in practice, there isnt enough moderation to stop the threads from being closed.
please consider turning OFF auto-closing threads
I understand. What I’m trying to indicate is that with more active moderation, this will hopefully no longer be the case. We’ll have to see how things work out, but my intention is to moderate more actively from now on.
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I’m going to step out on a limb here, because things have been getting a bit heated for a while now. Goodbye technical discussions, hello barroom discussions.
Unfortunately, the written word doesn’t allow you to hear the intonation. So it’s hard to feel the irony and sarcasm in a text.
In your reply, I find it hurtful, indecent and inappropriate to criticise an honourable member of the Sailfish community and I’m hurt to see the direction the recent discussions are taking.
Please, don’t answer. This will be my first and last comment on the subject.
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