[READ THIS] Flagging & You!

GrangerHub Meta
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Hello everyone, my name is Hendrich. This has been a long time coming, but recently I felt that as a community, this had to be addressed.

FLAGGING & YOU!

What are flags? They are tools open to every user, used to let moderators know if posts are off-topic, inappropriate (to the guidelines), spam or requires special attention. These are not just moderator powers, users can do them too. Recently, I’ve been noticing a lot of toxic behavior, yet very little done by the community to fight against this. This post is to let you all know you have this power, use it!

These are the GrangerHub Community Guidelines. They are like the bible of GrangerHub, and you are it’s noble sheep. Read them. Remember them. Follow them. Don’t like it? Be at risk of bring flagged, or worse. These are not meant to harm you, but to help everyone fight against toxic behavior that derails good discussion.

Most importantly, this section explicitly gives you these powers:

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

Just flag it! If there are any questions, feel free to ask them here. Thanks for reading and most importantly, thanks for making GrangerHub a great place for everybody! :slight_smile:

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@Hendrich Shouldn’t a “How To Forum” thread be made, to help explain over everything including flags? :slight_smile: To help explain moderation, ETC.

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Intriguing.

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I would like to add that when a post is hidden by flags, it is not automatically deleted. The poster is given the opportunity to edit their post so that flags no longer apply to that post. This may include removing content that is inappropriate according to the community guidelines, or moving content that is appropriate to post on the forums, but is off topic in the current topic, to an existing or a new topic where the content better fits. Choosing the correct reason for a flag allows the poster to be notified better on what kind of correction is needed.

If a post contains any content that is considered inappropriate according to the community guidelines, it would be flag worthy, even if it might just be one inappropriate line, with the rest of the post being appropriate and even useful. Posters are responsible for the content they post, and moderators are not going to be focusing their time on editing every post that has inappropriate content, that is up to the poster to correct. This also serves as an incentive for posters to avoid making such flag worthy content in future posts.

In some cases, an entire post as a whole is off topic and can fit as a whole somewhere else, moderators can simply move the post in that case. But in other situations, there is content in the post that is appropriate and fits in the topic, but other content is mixed in with it that is off topic, has the potential to derail the topic, and deserves focus elsewhere. In such a case, it would be the poster’s responsibility to manually split the post’s content into multiple posts and moved to the topics they best fit in.

If a hidden post is not corrected in a few days, such a post does get deleted. If you get a lot of posts hidden by flagging, that can result in your trust level being reduced, which means you would have reduced abilities on the forums in such a case. If a poster gets ongoing flags and is warned, and is making no effort to improve their behavior nor respect the community guidelines, a suspension may result.

Try not to get offended if your post gets flagged, flagging a post is about keeping the discussions on the forums civil, organized, and fruitful, it is not meant to attack the poster. We all make mistakes at some point, and sometimes even a moderator might post something that should be flagged. The main thing is, lets work together to keep the environment here in good shape, keep the forums focused on improving Tremulous and its community, and most importantly, lets have fun together while doing that, this is a video game community after all.

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