Trusted Flaggers

[MagicalAzareal]

Trusted flaggers are individuals whose reports are granted greater weight than that of a regular reporter. Their reports may be prioritised, or in some cases, their reports may directly result in posts being hidden away, until a moderator reviews their report.

Discourse has a trusted flagger feature which automatically hides posts from brand new users, if those posted are flagged by spam by a high trust level user.

I don't agree with Discourse's model of automatically granting someone privileges on the basis of an obscure algorithm, however the concept of a trusted flagger forms a nice niche between a regular user and a moderator, especially for common issues like spam which are likely to be uncontroversial.

This could be a powerful feature for off-loading the burden of moderators onto users, who are at least trusted enough to be able to flag something correctly as spam.

 

[zappaDPJ]

This kind of good content promotion works exceptionally well on informational forums where opinion is less important than factual based content.

 

[l3ta]

Sorta like the community moderation Yahoo!Answers had. I remember Top Contributors could make questionable posts invisible by clicking the report button. Of course, some of them took it to heart and turned into report monkeys.

 

[frm]

This kind of system is a slippery slope if you allow messages to be flagged and hidden long enough for them to become irrelevant in the context of a conversation. It's best to have people you trust and hold the same values of your community to manually vet content in as close to real-time as you can. Otherwise, you end up losing your own platform in such a weighted system. Case in point, co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger.

 

[MagicalAzareal]

This kind of system is a slippery slope if you allow messages to be flagged and hidden long enough for them to become irrelevant in the context of a conversation. It's best to have people you trust and hold the same values of your community to manually vet content in as close to real-time as you can. Otherwise, you end up losing your own platform in such a weighted system. Case in point, co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger.

What happened to Larry Sanger? I hear he had a conflict with the other co-founder, Jimmy Wales?

And yeah, my main idea here is to use it for spam, otherwise it really blurs the line between a user and a moderator.

 

[frm]

What happened to Larry Sanger? I hear he had a conflict with the other co-founder, Jimmy Wales?

I didn't follow the entire stoy, but I think he left on his own accord.

Supposedly, it's because they had the same idea of letting editors have more and more power over the system through weight, such as this flagging topic asks. Eventually, trolls and left-leaning editors were able to seize power over edits. It's now next to impossible to correct things that are verifiably false as a new member or it'll go into discussion and nobody will ever approve its adoption (I think there's a voting system between editors with a lot of points and there's a coalition of sorts that will block edits).

I would invite anyone to try and edit Steven Crowder's "coronavirus misinformation" with a new paragraph that states facts from the CDC. It will quickly get pulled and go into Talk, not to be added to the page until the scare-tactic agenda is over. Or, correct any left-leaning talking point at that with verifiable facts; it will quickly be reverted or go into Talk.

This is why it's a slippery slope to assign members a weight to flag content as opposed to bringing them on as your staff.

If they're your staff, they will share the same vision as you. However, if you weigh the system, you are essentially selling your forum for free.

To put this into perspective, owners of shares in a company could essentially seize control of the company if they all come together and vote as 1 share = 1 vote, provided the original owner/partners didn't give up the 51% majority.

 

[Paul M]

Its a feature I would never use.
Reports are something a sites staff should handle, that is one of their functions.
If someone is trusted enough, then they should be a moderator, so its clear to everyone.

 

[arn]

I always thought there should be a threshold. If a post gets X reports, it should get hidden and until a mod sees it. That would allow overt spam to be dealt with.

Slashdot from back in the day had an interesting moderation system that gave random users moderation points:

FAQ - Slashdot

Moderation and Metamoderation​

I just got moderator access. What do I do?​

Moderate! Read comments (preferably at a low threshold) and when you see comments that are very insightful, or perhaps just plain off topic, select the appropriate option from the drop down list. When you're done, hit the 'Moderate' button. That's it! Moderation is like jury duty: You never know when you'll be selected, and when you get it, you only do it for a little bit.

 

[User37935]

We have something sort of similar, a broader group of members than mods/admin have the ability to use the "spam cleaner" option so they can nuke any spammers that get through - or any problem new users - and on XF this is easily undoable if a moderator wants to go in later.

I really like the concept in general of forum members being able to remove/block problem posters through weight of numbers, partly as it's forum democracy in action (if one member thinks another member is a moron, it's just an opinion, but if 20 think this, then likely it's true) and partly as it reduces stress/abuse on admin, as it's not a sole decision, it's what the community thinks.