“This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.”
It says it’s temporarily hidden, but during that time, is there any way for plebs like me to see what the post said? It’s kinda weird to have a fully-visible stub showing who posted something, but nothing about what was posted.
Yeah, that’s a bit odd—I thought the posts would be collapsed, like deleted posts when they’re hidden by default for mods. Furthermore, IMO it shouldn’t still say “temporary” if the flag was approved by a mod, so the hiding isn’t really “temporary” unless either the OP edits it and a mod re-approves it, or another mod later comes along and fully deletes it.
Until a relatively recent-ish Discourse update, prompted by this thread, normal members could view the content of hidden (but not deleted) posts, whereas now by default only TL4 (“Leaders”) and staff can.
So apparently Discourse added a setting that allows admins to customize who can see hidden (but not deleted) posts. It seems to me that might be useful to allow, e.g., TL2 and higher users (i.e. normal members) to be able to view hidden posts (e.g. off topic, too heated, etc), just like hiding on GItHub.
This would give mods a more granular option to preserve transparency unless its actually necessary to delete the content, e.g. spam, CoC violation, etc, and also ensure that a single flag from a higher-TL user doesn’t make content completely inaccessible by everyone until a mod reviews it.
@admins , what do you think?
5 posts were split to a new topic: How can someone check their Discourse Trust Level?
I let “regulars” (TL3) see hidden posts. That covers everybody in this topic and I’m more comfortable lowering the requirement to that level instead of to any TL2 member for now. If this comes up again, we’ll talk about lowering to TL2.