This has been a problem since the switch to Discourse forums. I know, it’s nothing new. Today I and another were mass flagged by one person using an alt army intent on disrupting a benign thread, which brings it back to my attention.
Is this, in any way, being looked into on the back end? Are we going to continually allow trolls to abuse their alts to silence and hide benign forum posts?
What is being done about this?
I admire how you’re using your mind-reading abilities for good. Sorta.
There’s a real possibility that you’re being genuinely flagged into oblivion by the actual majority of player in that forum. Have you considered that?
Funny, because I looked at the offending post and looked at the people who “liked” it.
All are 0 posts with the same, identical pet collections.
The poster has made other posts with other characters on the same thread taking a different position.
It is trolling. It is abuse. No “mind reading” involved.
If it’s flag abuse, then a mod will take care of it.
I understand the mods will handle it as it pops up. I’m asking if there is anything being done to solve the problem, rather than cure the symptoms.
When a single post or individual receives a lot of reports, it goes to our Moderation team for review while hiding the post once a certain threshold is reached. While the intent here is to hide stuff that the community feels is against the Code of Conduct, you are correct in that some individuals try to weaponize the reporting system. We can and do take action against people who abuse our reporting systems, but I wanted to go into a bit more depth on how we do it and how we hope to improve.
Currently, we review the flags in a Review queue. Here we can see all of the individuals who reported a post and what their flag reasons are, as well as their flag history. As you know individual characters are treated as singular accounts, so some will try to use multiple alts to flag a post. We can see this, and will suspend a user for systems abuse (which scales duration based on previous penalties, culminating in permanent loss of forum permissions). There are some ambitious plans to group character/account on the moderation side more clearly in the future (for example, we want things like Trust Level to share across characters. Account actions already work across characters).
One of the requests we have in to further improve how we monitor and support community health is to more easily surface these bad actors through reporting*. These data points and dashboards take time to get developed and updated, but it’s something we do take seriously and are working with partners on how to handle these types of infractions more intelligently with data rather than looking at reactionary reporting.
Something that you can do to help us: If you are confident that you are being harassed by someone exploiting the reporting system, contact our Moderation team. A link to the reported post is extremely helpful, as is any links to previous or similar behavior. From there our Moderation team can review that person’s flag history and determine if further action needs to be taken.
*Edit: For clarification, the use of “reporting” here is more of the analytical kind of report, where we can pull data on potential malicious use of the flag system.
Thank you very much for the swift reply, Glax. I will send a ticket in to the team for them to look into the situation. I also very much appreciate you going into further detail with how these systems are intended to work. Thank you 
Here’s hoping for more improvements in the future.
There is a thread right now on the forums where someone is mass flagging comments in under 1min from post. Clearly the person is abusing the system. Even simple things like replies to someone i am agreeing with are being mass flagged in record time.
Glaxigrav does not work 24 hours a day. They are not on the moderation team. They did give you directions for reporting the activity to the moderation team.
Can you imagine? We’d have even more cause to call him a robot.