Ask HN: When were flagged submissions/comments added to the profile page?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657663

by olvy0 • 3 years ago

105 85 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I noticed it just now in my status page. I'm fairly convinced it wasn't there last time I viewed it.

It's a useful addition, if only to check occasionally that I haven't mistakenly flagged a comment or a submission.

LinuxBender• 3 years ago

When were flagged submissions/comments added to the profile page?

Not sure but here [1] are some of the other URL's on HN one could bookmark.

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#public... [not my repo]

mschuster91• 3 years ago

Gotta be in the last 14 days. Wonder what the use is though, when looking at my reports I see a couple spam flags and a dozen utterly vile and down-greyed comments. Not sure why anyone would want to see what they have reported...

Kiro• 3 years ago

I often accidentally flag something (on mobile) and this helps me undo that.

scandox2• 3 years ago

Well I just found out that somehow over the years I had flagged 30+ totally innocuous items. So I've unflagged them all. They were more like things I would have been interested in rather than upset by. So I guess I was flagging instead of favoriting or some such madness.

Brian_K_White• 3 years ago

Why does my own show 2 flagged submissions when I did not submit either of those things?

Is it saying that I flagged them?

edit, I see the unflag links now, which resolves that.

throwanem4• 3 years ago

It was added on Wednesday, about three weeks after I emailed to ask for some amelioration of my occasional clumsiness with phone screens leading to a high rate of erroneously flagged stories.

I didn't really go in with an expectation, certainly not for that kind of amazing responsiveness and turnaround time. Thanks, dang!

doubled112• 3 years ago

I was also shocked to see I had flagged quite a few articles, likely because of my own fat fingers.

throwanem4• 3 years ago

I knew I was doing it, I just hated that I couldn't fix it myself!

It also seems like flagging an article now no longer hides it, which is extra great since the unflag link is right there without even needing to visit the profile to undo a mistap.

gota• 3 years ago

Oh my god, I have flagged dozens. None on purpose.

I have just unflagged all of them, hopefully It helps

c0brac0bra• 3 years ago

Same here. I assumed flagging was something that required a certain amount of reputation. I've never even purposefully tried to see how to flag something, and I have 4 submissions flagged.

sdflhasjd2• 3 years ago

If it's any consolation, the page doesn't show flagged submissions that ended up being removed, so you're likely only going to see stuff you've accidentally flagged.

Flagging could do with a confirmation prompt perhaps.

xupybd• 3 years ago

I've flagged articles I don't recognize. I'm not sure how. There might need to be a UX change here.

ehPReth• 3 years ago

me too! some of them looked kind of interesting too, probably just hit the wrong thing on mobile I guess?

there was some stuff I definitely meant to flag like spam or whatever but definitely some stuff that was not supposed to be

marginalia_nu2• 3 years ago

Hmm, I have flagged like 15-20 submissions, maybe 3 intentionally... A confirm dialog may help.

codetrotter• 3 years ago

I intentionally flag posts sometimes.

I think a free-form text input for reason would be nice. No one even has to read the reason most of the time.

Providing a reason for flagging serves multiple purposes:

- makes it so that you don’t accidentally flag something when you don’t mean to

- discourages overly aggressive flagging

- in some cases the reason for flagging might be more subtle. So casual review of flagged posts by mods might miss the subtle reason it is being flagged by people. If we explicitly state the reason, it can help mods see why a post is being flagged by people in such situations

matsemann• 3 years ago

My 9-10 pages of flagged comments seem mostly good, almost all of them are dead and things I think I intentionally flagged.

My 3 pages of flagged submissions seems a bit more random. Perhaps I don't remember the reason just skimming through, but some of them are certainly accidental.

xoa• 3 years ago

A confirm dialog may help.

I'm not really a fan of dialogs in flow if it can be avoided, at least not without trying other indicators first, but I would agree some UX experimentation might be worthwhile. Like rather then have it simply go to "unflag", a two letter difference purely in gray, also have it turn bold/bright red for an hour? At least as an option? I just tried playing with the CSS and flagging/unflagging your post, and setting [unflag] to color:red;font-weight:bold makes a real difference without being obnoxious.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

I would like the ability to disable flagging for my account. Too easy to accidentally flag when scrolling. Or perhaps only offer flagging when you’re on a thread or viewing an individual comment.

SllX• 3 years ago

I used to think I caught accidental flags very well… I no longer believe that after reviewing my list of flagged submissions. I just unflagged anything I didn’t think was worth flagging in the first place but some of these are years old.

napsterbr• 3 years ago

Heh, same here, although I always held the thought "well, if I did not do such a good job at detecting accidental clicks, I'd never know about it". Now I do!

userbinator• 3 years ago

I checked again and have a bunch of flagged submissions, mostly deliberate, but there were certainly some accidental ones in there. Great feature indeed.

leros• 3 years ago

Huh. Apparently I've flagged and voted lots of stuff by accident.

cube22222• 3 years ago

I occasionally accidentally flag and unflag... I didn't expect to find 30 accidental flags there.

I think it'd be great for the flag button to show a confirmation popup before actually flagging.

jraedisch• 3 years ago

Definitely. Turns out I have about two accidental flags a year.

7373737373• 3 years ago

The same goes for upvotes. I'm never really sure whether I actually upvoted or accidentally downvoted a comment. This is bad UI.

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

Yeah I had no idea how many accidental flags I’ve done so this is really useful

japhyr• 3 years ago

Did the order of actions in the row of links change as well?

Right now `flag` is between the timestamp and `hide`, neither of which I ever click on for a story. I wonder if it used to be next to something I (and many others) clicked more often?

dang• 3 years ago

No, we didn't change that.

johtso• 3 years ago

All 10 on my flagged posts were accidents. Think this probably highlights a UX issue and the need for an "are you sure?" popup.

komadori• 3 years ago

Ditto I have accidently flagged 12 submissions without noticing (but no comments). This is in addition to the many times where I've noticed an accidental flagging and immediately unflagged it. In my case, it's entirely a consequence of reading HN on a phone.

kelnos4• 3 years ago

I think a popup would be annoying and get in the way. A better option might be to highlight in some way (perhaps via a change in text color) items that you have flagged, so you can easily see that you may have made a mistake.

ed25519FUUU• 3 years ago

Wow great feature. Apparently I accidentally hit the “flag” button all of the time because every one of my flagged posts was an accident. Now I get to go through and unflag them all. Sorry about that whoever made the post!

amccloud• 3 years ago

Thanks for the tip. Every flag for me was accidental.

lumpa• 3 years ago

Nice to see it added, quite a lot of people found out they had fat finger flagged some content when I told HN about these (then) hidden pages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30253799

Edit: as stated in that post, you can also see your vouched items by accessing https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched

howard941• 3 years ago

Happy to see the link to Hiddens. Sometimes I hide the wrong one and there was no way out.

IAmLiterallyAB• 3 years ago

I had 10, all of which were accidental. It's so easy to accidentally hit flag with this UI

mistrial9• 3 years ago

the list clearly includes actions from long ago, so this data was recorded, just not visible to the account holder

in that sense, it is somehow a benefit, to see more of what is tracked behind the scenes. It seems obvious that these simple values are easily used make profiles of profiles, in aggregate.

code_duck• 3 years ago

Glad to hear I wasn’t the only one accidentally flagging submissions! I had about 20 on my list going back to 2011 and only 1-2 were legitimately flag-worthy. Far fewer comments, only 4, and of those only 1 was by error. However my account can still flag submissions, but I noticed recently I don’t have the ability to flag comments for whatever reason.

idlewords• 3 years ago

Flag 'em all; let dang sort them out.

faizshah• 3 years ago

@dang can we add more friction to the flag thing? Maybe just a yes/no after.

ratg13• 3 years ago

Tangentially related .. can we bring back average karma score or whatever it was?

I really felt like it was a good tool to help curb people from posting useless throwaway comments.

Anyone know why this was removed?

rmellow• 3 years ago

On mobile it's too easy to accidentally click Flag.

I checked my profile and noticed a handful of accidental Flags this year alone.

Perhaps a confirmation dialog would solve it.

wodenokoto• 3 years ago

Apparently I’ve flagged about 100 submissions since 2015, and I’d wager none were intentional.

Apologies to posters that didn’t get the complete chance their submissions deserved.

eimrine• 3 years ago

Sometimes my comments get flagged, that is always a good lesson on what is possible to say in some abroad communities. In some areas of possible opinions I do not even receive a single downvote, but a flag and it is always instant. I have no opinion about the topic, just a little observation.

skilled• 3 years ago

I have like 200+ flags and every single one has been intentional. I am not sure the accidental excuse applies here. You either flag something or you don’t.

antoineMoPa• 3 years ago

It's surprisingly easy to flag something by mistake while scrolling & browsing HN on iphone.

Jtsummers• 3 years ago

Probably on Android as well. The "flag" link is right under my thumb as I scroll through the page.

scandox2• 3 years ago

It's not an excuse. It's a fact. Just read this thread. Thousands of flags of totally innocuous material by accident by scores of users. Including myself. Or maybe you think I subliminally love flagging articles concerning improvements to the Python programming language...Which would be worrying.

yongjik• 3 years ago

I flagged the parent. Yes, intentionally.

johnchristopher• 3 years ago

Jeez, I knew I sometimes misclicked but I have to do something about it.

gumby• 3 years ago

Wow, looks like I flagged several posts ver the years, 100% by accident.

dragontamer• 3 years ago

I just checked my flags.

Everything earlier than 2017 or so was straight up a mistake. I didn't know what "flag" did, so I must have clicked it to experiment back then and just never realized I kept the flag this whole time. I just undid those flags.

There were 3 or 4 submissions I actually flagged for real that I'll keep the flag on. A bunch of comments that I've flagged.

----------

This seems like a good feature, in practice, I seem to have a fair number of mistaken flags (albeit from earlier before I knew what the feature did). But even today I've got a few misclicks, perfectly normal topics I must have accidentally hit the "flag" button on that I really shouldn't have.

pmontra• 3 years ago

I'd like a setting to disable flagging. I saw that I accidentally flagged some submissions and unflagged then now. I probably upvoted many of them and flagged them instead of tapping the link on my phone.

I'm always surprised when I see some submission flagged on purpose by others. They are often interesting stuff. I upvoted and commented some of them.

phkahler• 3 years ago

I had no idea I ever flagged a submission.

O1111OOO• 3 years ago

When I saw this post, I thought the new flagging links were added to help track biases from users. For example, there might be users on this platform that will flag anything that might be critical of their fav tech company or political ideology.

I did not expect to see so many comments (nearly all of them, ~2 hours into this post) referring to accidental flagging.

Whatever the reasons, I like the new links.

insin• 3 years ago

Since lots of people are accidentally flagging on mobile and I'm currently revisiting my Hacker News extension to add a Safari version, I'm adding something which will let you choose your preferred solution for this (hide the flag control or require a confirm):

https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/issues/14#issuecomm...

rendaw• 3 years ago

Am I the only one who doesn't have these links in my profile?

akg_67• 3 years ago

Link disappears if you don't have flagged submissions and comments. I had a few accidental flagged submissions, once I unflagged them, link disappeared.

arun-mani-j• 3 years ago

It's interesting to see how many people have flagged by mistake. I'm a relatively new user of HN and has been always shocked to see many good posts getting flagged.

I also think either a confirmation dialog or "what's wrong?" input for the flag would be good.

(As a side note, I have seen many good comments being down voted too without any reason, but that's for another day probably :D )

sethammons2• 3 years ago

lots of calls for a pop up confirmation. Consider colors or bolding: click flag, it becomes bold and red.

Ask HN: When were flagged submissions/comments added to the profile page?

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