Flagging posts/topics

Hey all,

I’ve changed the “inappropriate” flag (“This post contains content that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct or a violation of our community guidelines”) to a slightly more general “not constructive” flag, with the description:

  • It’s Not Constructive This post contains non-constructive content, for example it may be repetitive, trolling, argumentative, or include content that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or a violation of our community guidelines.

If you’re seeing posts/replies that aren’t just not interesting to you but are not constructive, please help by flagging them, both to help maintain/increase the signal/noise ratio, and to help other posters be aware of which is which without having to get a potentially scary message from the moderators.

I’ve also heard some concern that some people might be posting about techniques they’ve applied for patent protection on, setting up a potential trap for people who might implement those techniques, so as a minimal step towards dealing with that I’ve also taken the opportunity to add the phrase “This includes deceptively encouraging the use of patent-encumbered techniques.” to the “It’s Illegal” flag category, in case anyone’s aware of cases where that’s happening.

2 Likes

It should be possible to delete flagged posts. Hiding multiple posts in a thread just makes the whole thread look ugly and annoying.