>1) Any member of a thread can red flag a post. This means that each member of a thread must cooperate with all the other member to avoid being red flag. This might tend to influence a member, so as to cause a member to subordinating his/her true judgement to not be in opposition or conflict with the group leader or the group as a whole. I feel all member should feel free to express themself openly, without fear of being flagged, even if a member's position is in the minority.

Hi Leland,

I sent few messages to David before, when I see typo in the thread title or badly worded title of the thread. In some cases he didn't respond and in one case he fixed typos and replied to me, that I can use red flag mechanism. So, I started to do that in couple of occasions. I really dislike typos/grammar/spelling errors, so I always want them to be corrected. I don't see a mechanism on that site to update message or thread title. UT forum is much better, because now any user can update his/her message and in case of typo in the title any user can send a private message to any of UT consultants.
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>You have stated that a member is red flagged when the following, or simular, violations are committed:
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<snip>

I think every member of a forum should be free to express their honest opinions regarding any topic, and other members to the forum should highly respect this privilege of expression, as long as no harm is being done to any member or to the forum itself.

Well, letting other users know, that person can be banned from the site, is harmful for the forum itself, but I didn't start that thread and just pointed out that possibility.

>2) There is a possibility that members of the forum might abuse their right to flag other members due to personal, rather than professional, reasons.

This is what happened in my case, I believe. I do suspect one particular user, though I have no proof.

This also would lead a member to become over cooperative with the group leader in order to stay in the group's good graces and avoid being red flagged. A possible solution to this weakness might be to require two or more members approval before the flag was place against an offending member's post. Also, the forum could have a mediator who would be responsible to review all flagged post to insure a member is not being flagged based on another members alterative motive, like wishing to remain the group leader, etc. I think it is very possible that such abuses could be on going in Tek-Tips. Every effort should be taken to eliminate the politics and provide a professional atmosphere of candid discussion.

It would be nice, if the person, whos posts were red-flagged, became aware of that and received notifications before any actions would be taken against him. It would let that person a chance to correct hes/her behavior and not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

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>3) If I understand it correctly, once a post is flagged, the entire thread will be deleted. This is unfair to innocent member who have not committed any violations.
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Right, but this is not exactly correct. Only offending messages could be removed. Of course, if person was banned, all his/her threads are now deleted and innocent members would loose their replies and well deserved stars.

>4) Once a post is deleted, it is gone. There is no way to go back and review the events leading up to a member being flagged. There should be some way to access the offending post and entire thread, should it ever need to be reviewed by FCC or other regulatory authority. If a post were found to be wrongly flagged and deleted, there is no way to restore it to its original standing. The MSSQL backend database of Tek-Tips, and its IE browser frontend, should be programmed so that flagged posts will not appear within the forum, but would still be available within the database. This would allow for wrongfully deleted threads to be un-flagged and restored to there original state. Also, this would allow management to access the deleted posts should any controversy develope regarding the deleltion, so management would have evidence substantiating its actions.
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Exactly. Great suggestion.

>These are just a few suggestion that should be consider for possible implimentation. If implimented, I think Tek-Tips would be a much stronger forum.

Implemented :) Picky, as always...

Thanks, Leland.