This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden

I see this notification on posts that were posted weeks ago and have multiple upvotes. They are in no way controversial. Why have they not been cleared and reinstated?

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There are no flagged posts which have not been cleared. A post need not be “controversial” to violate ToS.

Such hidden posts remain hidden until auto deleted by the system after 30 days.

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@skieurope There are a whole bunch of flagged posts on this thread. What are your top takeaways learned from the most recent admissions cycle for rising seniors about to apply? - #71 by ucbalumnus I’ve seen it on other threads as well.

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Yes there are. All of which fall into my earlier explanation. S moderator agreed with the flag, so the post remains hidden until auto deleteed.

I’m not a mod, thank goodness, as it’s a lot of thankless work, but I agree 100% that there are flagged posts where I can see zero reason for the flag. The one you linked by @ucbalumnus is a great example. I won’t comment anymore on the subject. I just wanted you to know that you are not alone in this observation.

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It seems to me people are flagging posts they don’t agree with. In my opinion CC will continue to lose good posters. Every time a “controversial” thread is closed CC risks losing posters who have in the past been helping and positive contributors.

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Thanks for the heads up. We will review this post and the moderating policy to see if there needs to be a change. Now that @CC_Jon is back we can take a closer look at this.

Generally, if a post is hidden you should know the exact TOS or forum rules line it crossed. If you don’t know, then we need to improve our process and communication.

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I think that’s key, but unfortunately for a lot of flagged posts it’s very unclear what the violation was. Maybe you could add text explaining why a post was flagged? Example: instead of simply saying “This post was flagged by the community”, a more specific message like “This post was flagged as off-topic” would help. And maybe add new categories like “debating”?

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We have some work to do then. Thanks for your patience while we refine the process!

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@CC_Mike actually…I don’t think I’ve ever seen an explanation for why a post was flagged by the community.

There are good explanations provided by the moderators as to why threads are closed!

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Occasionally. Sometimes though it’s just a “because we said so.”

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I agree with this whole thread. I really wonder about most of my deleted comments…I end up assuming that certain people carry a lot of weight here and are intolerant of opinions they don’t agree with.

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A comment about posts that are hidden when there is nothing wrong with them:

When a post is flagged and we review it, we may delete the problematic post. By then, it might have numerous replies. All the replies are no longer relevant because the post has been removed. Moderators don’t have time to review every single reply to a problematic post, and so the option we might choose is to hide the direct replies to the post in question. If there aren’t too many replies, maybe we just edit a little so that the comment still makes sense.

Hope that explains it better.