Ask HN: Should flag have a confirmation dialog? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should flag have a confirmation dialog?

4 pointspuddintane7 comments

I had accidentally flagged a front page post that by no means had a reason to be flagged. Thankfully you guys do have the un-flag feature and I was able to quickly reverse my mis-click almost instantaneously.

My question however would be would it be better to include a "confirm" dialog, or multiple flag clicks to affirm the users choice to flag?

I do understand that it's probably not really an issue just wondering if this has ever been pondered and talked about among the HN community, truly a wonderful group of humans.

I could not find any posts with those keywords - If I missed the post I do apologize.

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I think this behavior is the correct one.

    - If i want to do something, do not make me click more than once
    - If I clicked wrong, let me undo it

I agree with the second, the first however I believe in some situations a confirmation can be ideal - delete, de-activate, flag, etc.

Of course the quick unflagging is nice and works - just wondering if it would help with alerts in the back end.

Maybe the logs could be analyzed to see how many "mis-clicks" are triggered daily?

This should be easily do-able since the calls are timestamped and could be compared (only count flag/unflag that is within 20 seconds of each other or something similar?)

Flagging should, perhaps, take you directly to the post. I've sometimes found it difficult to find the link that I accidentally flagged again to undo it.

If not that, we need a "Flagged Articles/Comments" in our user profiles so we can go back and review what we flagged and correct our errors. At least then it'd be a two-step fix instead of a look and hope "unflag" is on the front page or two.

Happens to me all the time with mobile; the flag link is a bit too easy to click by mistake.

Embarrassingly I happened to do this on a desktop - waking up so more then likely due to being groggy!

No. My assumption is that it takes more than one flag for a post to be "flagged." Meaning that there needs to be some consensus to draw it to the attention of moderators.

Once it is flagged the reason for flagging should be obvious to moderators. If there are multiple interpretations, or flagging is not obvious, perhaps the flag is not valid.

The last/only thing I flagged was something that appeared to be a thinly veiled advertisement. With Show HN I think veiled advertisements undermine the overall integrity of Hacker News.

If this turns out to be a real problem, a better solution would be to remove the "flag" link on the front page, forcing you to visit the article's comments page to flag it. This is already how flagging works for individual comments.

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