Is Something Being Done About the False Flaggers of These Forums?

Actually that is exactly how they determine if something is wrong with a post if people report it. They don’t hire enough moderators to read everything. And the forum posters really don’t get to decide what is allowed, blizzard doesn’t that, forum posters can merely flag what they think is in violation of the CoC.

I do agree with you the software they are using is just terrible. They made such a fuss about removing downvotes because it buried posts, but this current software takes a lot less flags to do the same thing and then they have that automatic lockdown.

However, I actually have never seen a thread that gets locked repeatedly that didn’t have a lot of real infractions in it.

Which part of the OP has a lot of infractions?

Which often results in false flagging things that made them uncomfortable because some of us dont adopt and worship the norms and site culture and instead like to be us.

Great example where the people in charge admitted their own behavior was lead by their own insecurities and hatred of others being free to be themselves
https://twitter.com/aNerdskull/status/1278587330094198784

You cannot control how people feel about things though. What may seem normal and trivial to person X could be triggering to person Y, even if you think it’s ridiculous or illogical. Just like how it’s well within the OP’s right to feel like the system is being abused on him. All our feelings are valid.

It’s no different to the in-game vote kick feature. Sometimes you feel you did nothing wrong, but somehow people decide to kick you for doing something completely trivial. Things like these are out of our hands and sometimes all it takes is just enough people to have a certain PoV to outcast you. Either way, we cannot measure positive/negative intention through programming. At least not yet.

Unfortunately we live in a werld where some people are scared and have “sheep” mentality. Being Alpha humans scares these people. I guess that’s all there is to it.

What you’ll find is the person who flags you will have no valid argument. I can understand being flagged for being abusive or rude. But mostly it will come down to a difference of opinion. And when they know they have lost they use the flagging system.

Yes you can, with punishment. It’s up to us, as posters, to read and know the forum code of conduct.

That’s a whole world of different. You cannot abuse that system. Nobody has to play with you. You can be vote kicked for any reason, or no reason. Blizzard has already stated this.

Blizzard’s house, Blizzard sets the norms. If you don’t like the norms, there’s other places to post.

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Let’s say we isolate the forum to 5 people. Person A, B, C, D have opinion 1. But Person E has opinion 2 and vocalizes it.

The current state of the forum makes it so that the 4 people disagree with Person E and decides to flag their post. That’s why I compare it to the vote-kick. It’s a numbers game instead of an actual “oh cool, this is a different PoV, let’s see what sort of discussion we can have.”

As long as enough people think that something is offensive, it’s flagged. And that’s what difficult to measure because how do we know what everyone’s thresholds are? Like for me I only flag posts that are heavily insulting and use vulgarities. But to someone else, that could be funny and they will never flag it. But if enough people have the same mentality as me, then it’s more easier for those posts to be flagged. On the other hand, if more people have the opposing PoV, it will never get flagged.

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Bingo. I don’t think there should be a downvote option at all. It’s bad. Too much democracy is bad. If you want to disagree with a post, reply to it and discuss. voting on someone’s opinion to the point of silencing them is juvenile playground behavior for the uncultured.

That is quite incorrect, Blizzard sets the rules, the norms and expected behavior is far different and are formed based on the majority of people’s beliefs and ideas that inhabit a place. For example the majority of players might believe that it is trolling to not be a meta slaves, so anyone who will go agaisnst that is going against the norm but not against the rules.

An average person who wants to fit in will blindly accepts the norms whenever right or wrong in order to fit in.

Me on the other hand, I will decide if a norm is good or not and act based on that, if it is wrong I will relentlessly point that out no matter how it upsets the status quo : )

In other words even if some behavior is bad or even against the CoC as long as most people agree with that post, it wont be reported and will never get banned.

This of course always leads to a site’s norms and culture to be often independent of rules, do what is expected of you based on cultural norms, you are fine, go against them, you are not.

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Has this thread been getting locked repeatedly?

Except the TOS and the CoC are par and parcel for posting on the forums. If you can’t abide by them, you’ll find yourself being silenced on the forum regularly.

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I’ve made goofs in grammar after I post and immediately edited it. And it didn’t attach the orange pencil to indicate it was edited. So yeah, there does seem to be a timer before it treats a message as edited.

I saw a thread a week or so ago where someone created a thread on this method business, the thread had about 10 or so responses and they weren’t supportive of the OP and the thread creator then changed the subject and the entire opening post to something entirely different and all the responses made no sense, nor did the fact that the OP had been buried. All without an orange edit mark.

How to white knight 101. Lessons learned here for every else wanting to be a blizz drone.
You’re not a forum moderator. You don’t get paid to patrol these forums. It’s not your job to police what others day.

Of course if people think they can change their message away from a trollish post … it doesn’t work like that.

One time I got heated and included a banned word. I posted and immediately went “ok, I went too far.”

I immediately edited the post and changed the word to something clean.

I got a forum vacation for “circumventing the language barrier”.

Yeah. I wasn’t trying to circumvent it. I was correcting my own heated response. But I didn’t contest it. I took the silence. I still deserved a silence as I DID break the rules. But they gave it to me for the wrong reason.

So yeah, editing your message won’t save you from what you’ve posted. So … think twice before you post. Because they can see the unedited message.

EDIT: Yes, this was technically a CoC violation. But I feel that in context, its a fair thing to bring up. If Blizzard chooses to give me a silence, I’ll take it. But I still believe its important to say in the context of this thread.

Orctang, how would you know this so certainly?

Also I went to try to learn more about how the flag system works: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/forum-flags-on-the-new-forums/6080

I found this part of the discussion interesting:

Yes, in a way. I’ve read somewhere else that false reports decrease your trust level (although I don’t know a lot about the new trust-system, but that and the flagging seems to be linked) but I’m not sure about that. That’s something we’ll find out later.

It’s purely speculation but I think the mod team will have the tools to determine if there are a malicious group of people who are abusing the feature.

I believe the intent behind it is to push more interesting or relevant posts to the top. But of course in reality it becomes “I don’t like what you’re saying so get out of my sight.”

It’s also interesting because sometimes it’s all about the narrative and the mob you’re dealing with. In my country’s subreddit, I remember one post celebrating how about racial harmony, and then another that was insulting a minority group, so I posted there with a counter-argument and got downvoted to oblivion while my other post in the other thread was highly upvoted lol.

Social dynamics aren’t easy to pin down

Most people who play this game are insufferable busybodies who cry at one bad word or sketchy joke. I miss the old internet before normal people ruined it.

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Hiding your forum profile does make it more difficult for forum stalkers to find your posts, as it prevents them from see your activity feed.