Discourse has a system for flagging posts. The primary purpose of flagging is so that our members can alert each other to issues in what they write. The goal is that if you do something that our community thinks needs some retrospection and rewrite that we can self-correct and keep the community a warm, inviting and well behaved place. The admins will watch and intervene, but unlike our previous platform we will depend on all the members here to make things “self-correcting.” And the thing to understand is that the system rewards and penalized the self-correcting behavior of the community. If you are diligent and address flaggings with changes and you don’t inappropriately flag posts then you are rewarded with more trust. If you are recalcitrant and fight flags or throw inappropriate flags you are penalized with loss of trust.
If someone posts something you believe is out of bounds, like cursing, being disrespectful, going off-topic by posting topics in the wrong places or hijacking discussions, or just makes people feel uncomfortable, then you flag them. This alerts the poster to a concern. If it is not abundantly clear, then you can also follow up with a flag that sends a PM to the poster describing your concern, but this is optional. And we would encourage you to not engage in any private discussions about flagging issues, just provide additional information on why there is a concern, and a PM is entirely optional.
If several members all flag a post, then your post will be hidden and you will get a clarifying message about why the post was hidden and guidance on how to edit the post to resolve the issues. Other members won’t be able to see your post and if you do nothing it will be deleted in 30 days and you get a trust penalty (not good). If you edit your post then it will become visible and there won’t be any penalty. If you edit the post and it still doesn’t address concerns and gets additional flags then the situation becomes more serious with admin intervention and more serious trust penalties.
So this is a quick overview of the whole flagging. We will be writing more about flags. As we make this transition the admin team will be taking special care to not invoke flagging in ways that penalize any members for not understanding and we will do everything we can to guide you. If you get flagged you can always PM one of the admins and you will be guided through the process. This is a learning process for all of us and we appreciate your patience as we adapt to a whole new way of keeping our community warm, welcoming and respectful.