I’ve noticed a lot of people asking general questions about how to do certain things on the BBS or how certain aspects of the BBS work on the General Moderation Topic, but I think that we can all agree that this is not the best thread to do so. And so, I have taken it upon myself to create a topic for just such a purpose so that we can keep the General Moderation Topic dedicated to moderation-related matters and public executions.
@orenwolf , feel free to shift any general Q&A posts here and/or to make any changes to the text of this here thread.
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I don’t think this is the right place to post this. I am really unsure where to though. Is there a way to search through open topics? There are a lot of topics on this board, and I tried finding the right one to post something under through search, but I am getting pages and pages of closed topics I need to scroll past and not finding any good options with search terms.
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Ah. I will give that a go.
Oh, and apparently I can just put “status:open” in the search bar to achieve the same result, seeing what it does. Thanks.
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Is there no way to flag a user profile for inappropriate content? I sometimes see users posting the most innocuous things, but if you look at their profile (even just the summary that you see by clicking on something that they have posted), it’s clearly just an ad for an online casino or porn (or both). I don’t want to flag posts that are innocuous, even though it’s clear that the posts are just in an effort to get people to look at the profile.
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Oh that’s definitely bad. “Spam profiles” are usually humans who sign up, place spam links in their user profile, but don’t post. We started sending profile info entered by new users to Akismet for spam blocking a while back, but it may be missing some of them.
The joke is on them, though, because we don’t display clickable links on any trust level 0 (new) user profile by design. You have to achieve trust level 1 for that.
At any rate, please definitely report any spam profiles you see, you should feel 100% confident in flagging any posts they made.
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Also here’s a link to all open topics, since every old discussion topic is supposed to be auto-closed after a while, this should be a small-ish list no matter what:
https://bbs.boingboing.net/search?q=status%3Aopen
Hmm there are a few topics in there that probably should be closed @orenwolf. I flagged two.
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I’ll have a look. the most common cause of those posts getting “stuck” is the post having been manually closed and reopened at some point (which seems to nuke the timer), or the post being auto-closed due to flagging and reset (though maybe that particular case was corrected? I can’t remember).
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I have a question about the Ignore Function.
If I ignore somebody, will I not see posts from other, non-ignored users in reply to or quoting the ignored user?
You will still see replies to the person ignored.
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Thank you for letting me know! I still have not gotten to the point where I feel a need to ignore anyone, but it’s food for thought for when someone really gets under your skin.
@orenwolf
Today I keep seeing a blue box in threads telling me some replies were hidden and I keep having to click it to make it go away and hidden replies to appear.
I am used to seeing the thread, the whole thread, and nothing but … etc. I don’t want any replies hidden.
Is this a new ‘feature’ that is working to spec, and can I turn it off? What triggers it and why is it deemed useful?
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I’m getting this too. I’ve noticed it happens when I’m trying to access the comment someone is replying to, by clicking the arrow or username at top right of the post.
It might have happened once on its own, I’m not sure if I triggered it or not…
(Specs for reference-- Samsung Tab S4 tablet, in both Samsung Internet/Chromium mod and Google Chrome, set to Desktop mode.)
Edit to add another gif with visible cursor:
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This was indeed a recently enabled feature. It appears it cannot be user-controlled, so I went ahead and disabled it.
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Yaaaaay!! 
Thank you very much.
I can’t see any use for it, except possibly in a forum where replies were nested with the comments they relate to. Which is not how things work here.
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Hmm. It’s not on by default on my Discourse instance, did someone flip the switch on that site setting? You can check the staff logs to see if someone toggled it.
enabled filtered replies view
is indeed off by default and that hasn’t changed.
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I was getting it on phone iOS earlier today but not on tablet iOS this evening.
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I also had it on my Android. Thanks to @orenwolf for disabling it!
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I saw this as well and immediately thought ‘oh god, please make it stop already’ so thanks for turning it off.
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@orenwolf
Some other Discourse behaviour that has been happening to me on and off for a while…
I quote someone, type a comment below and hit ‘reply’
As it replies I see the quote disappear from my reply box and the reply has lost the quote once it appears half a second later.
I edit my post to add the quote back in.
Discourse indicates that my post has been edited twice!
It happens very intermittently but it has happened enough times to become a clear ‘thing’ I am now familiar with having to fix.
Is it some sort of inadvertent user error (am I somehow triggering this) or is Discourse somehow doing something odd it should not be doing? (I guess, on a technicality, these may both be true.)
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