The software often eats posts after a certain threshold. Moderators can view and if necessary restore. However, moderators rely on flagging and the automated systems as primary defense mechanisms against another flood of Gators.
EDIT:
You may wish to ask the community why some of Israel’s posts get flagged into oblivion. I suspect the answer may surprise you.
the mods do not consistently draw the lines. I’ve been here a long time and that is a theory with an abundance of evidence. In your shoes I’d consider adjusting your expectations about consistency. I’ve never seen it here, I’m not sure what it would add, or why they would put in that effort, and it’s not a bug as far as I can tell.
Avoiding completely that this line of reasoning sounds a lot like
“highly imprisoned minority obviously should be highly imprisoned because they are high imprisoned”
… aside from that disaster … I think that we can relate that our non-perfect forum made of non-perfect humans and powered by non-perfect machines and amazon affiliate purchases has room for some non-perfect grumping.
I’ll flag myself out.
hear hear! I want everyone to have a good time too. It’s hard trying to explain to someone that they’re expecting too much for the price they pay! People have such strong feelings about their expectations!
nobody is stuck here. We are all free to go. inapt comparison? we hold the keys out.
Don’t shit in the drinking water if you want to avoid getting slugged. I agree it looks like victim blaming, but the issue is that the community has judged some posts to be incinderary and in bad faith. Take it up with the community and the Regulars who have and continue to contribute so much.
it’s infinitely large in here. I have yet to find the walls.
only if you hold that the user is a victim of something beyond their own control.
One can either have ones comment be the subject of a moderation action or one can be the victim of a moderation campaign. There are at least 2 ways to get zapped, probably more. Sometimes it’s the software, sometimes its a host or mod.
How is should look to us is all a matter of POV, expectations, and in some cases, entitlements. I know who holds title here, and it ain’t me. I am entitled to zilch, zip, zeeeeeeero. The people who do, they’re pretty happy mutants.
We can discuss or argue moderation all day long (wouldn’t be the first time!!) but I think it has always come down to one bullet point around here. Fall afoul of it and you might, no, will get ‘dinged’.
#• Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball
All these years I been around various different generations of comment software on BoingBoing and yet somehow I never thought of that…
Based on my experience online since the early 80s, including moderating some pretty big forums, I’m going to speculate that were one to do so, you’d get a certain vocal subset of the overall userbase say some unpleasant things pretty loudly, some might refer to me indirectly using unflattering words, maybe a few say “eh, he’s OK, maybe a bit different but OK” and most users wouldn’t say anything at all.
Actually we don’t know that at all in my case above or in others. What we know is that there is an algorithm whereby some weighted value of flags from some number of user accounts may or may not trigger a response from a moderator. Its really nothing to do with community, just a preset threshold of accounts performing an action. As has been discussed before this could be used for brigading as well.
What is a community, but a collection of accounts? It is true that the flagging software could be abused by brigades. That is why Regulars were an institution - a bulwark against brigading behavior.
Anyone who has run or moderated a forum can tell you there is a difference between a collection of accounts and a core active set of users which define the characteristics of the forum. That core set is generally the “community” of the forum.
And it was discussed as well why the large number of regulars with one set of views can easily still do what amounts to brigading especially since there is no “un-flag” feature. I suspect I’m not the only one who has clicked twice to see the hidden content that results from flags and scratched my head as to why it got flagged as it was a perfectly on topic cromulent comment that didn’t break rules in an obvious way.
You suspect correctly. 
I get stuff disappeared occasionally but I can usually figure out why. Sometimes, though, it’s just like “what? Well, OK then.” and I don’t worry about it.
Seconded.
If it is flagged to threshold by the community (this takes 3 flags) you will get notified that your post was auto hidden and invited to edit it to fix the issue which auto-unhides the post.
If it was flagged 1 or 2 times by the community and a moderator decided those flags were worth acting on it depends what the decision was:
agree with community flags and hide in anticipation of edit, you will get notified, this is conceptually identical to 3 community flags just “faster”
agree with community flags and delete, no notification to anyone
disagree with community flags, no notification to anyone
defer community flags, no notification to anyone
So really it depends if the mod thinks the post is salvageable through the hide, notify, anticipate author edit to improve cycle. That traditionally is NOT the case at BB where deletion was always preferred.
Thanks, Jeff!
And this is why I am currently preferring to Agree with (hide) posts (or defer to the community) instead of deleting them wherever possible - so that there’s transparency both to the user and those reading as to what happened.
However, when topics get out of hand, or especially egregious posts, deletion still happens from time to time. Also, other mods may make different choices (though, I now handle the vast majority of mod actions here).
I’ve gotten deleted enough times without notification to believe that it’s more now, not less.
Thanks for the clarification. While from the admin perspective I do see how 3 flags and delta (notification or no notification) makes the admin job much easier I still see how this system can be abused by the userbase, effectively brigading unpopular opinion.
If I may ask for further clarification, do the “disagree” and “defer” options mean something like reset flag counter whereby the admin can decide that the comment was OK after all?
(ping @orenwolf on this as well)
Disagree means remove the flag, yes. Defer means leave the flag but do nothing - essentially, the comment is an edge case and we leave the flag there for the community to decide - if it gets three flags, it will be hidden.
I flagged something this morning by mistake. I’d intended to flag a post, but I flagged a comment and immediately realized my error. I thought I used to have the option to remove the flag, but I couldn’t for some reason.
