This is the third piece in a sequence. The first asked whether Sloan had flagged anyone else — it had. The second documented what I found out — Slo...
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Hey @dannwaneri, I'm on the DEV team and deal with the challenge submissions directly. I just double checked and can confirm your Game Jam submission was in the pool we sent to the judges.
Thank you for checking and confirming directly . That's the answer I needed. Good to know it was in the pool...
@francistrdev @xulingfeng @jess @ben — third piece in the sequence. Documents what happened after the Sloan articles: the LLM visibility article deleted after the first flag, the Qodo article flagged despite full disclosure from the start, the Game Jam submission invisible in the submissions list after first-hour engagement. Can't prove suppression. Can document the pattern.
The closing question is for @jess and @ben specifically: if there's an account-level flag that affects distribution, should authors be told when it's active? @xulingfeng had to run a controlled experiment to find out. That's the thing worth answering.
@fm @sylwia-lask @bumbulik0 — you were all part of the earlier threads. This is where the story landed.
Seems like you are flagged, maybe @francistrdev can you check it?
I can confirm you were not flagged (at least on my end). Thanks for the reminder.
This happens to my article on "A Developer using AI, What could possibly go wrong" and it didn't appear on the tag "latest" list. After that post, everything went back to normal. To be fair, I would assume it was a bug due to the Rails upgrade I believe, but can't confirm.
Appreciate you checking and being direct about it. The Rails upgrade explanation for the submissions list is the first concrete alternative I've heard and if it happened to your article too, that's a bug worth DEV.to acknowledging publicly so authors know it's not them....
The broader pattern I documented - the engagement drop across multiple article types in the same two-week window still doesn't have an explanation. But ruling out account-level flagging on your end is useful data. That narrows it.
The question about notification still stands though. Whether it's a flag or a bug, authors finding out through a comment thread or not at all is the gap worth fixing...
Can you clarify on which articles specifically, so I can take a look at it? Thanks!
Sure. The articles where I noticed the pattern:
LLM visibility article (first run) — published before the Sloan articles, was gaining traction, deleted after the first Sloan flag. Republished June 23 as The LLM Visibility Tools Cost $79/Month. Mine is Open Source — underperformed compared to the first run.
Qodo article — Claude Code Wrote the PR. Here's What the Code Review Actually Caught — published June 17, flagged by Sloan the same day despite having full AI disclosure from the start.
Proof of Human — Proof of Human: I Built a Reverse Turing Test After Getting Flagged as AI — June Solstice Game Jam submission. First-hour engagement from tags, then flatlined. Wasn't visible in the challenge submissions list when I checked.
The submissions list issue you mentioned with the Rails upgrade might explain number 3. Numbers 1 and 2 are the ones I'm less sure about.
I can assure you that sloan comments are not associated with account flags in any automated sense. Any follow-up action would be made by a person.
We do have automated account flagging, but this is for raw spam, not for suppressing active users.
The popularity of any given posts has a lot of variability to it. This post itself is popular. I can see under the hood that it has
90 pointswhich is basically an adding up of all the reactions and other signals — and actually has been boosted by our underlying automation due to it being authentic and community-oriented.We manage a lot of signal and noise as a small team, so we're definitely prime to make mistakes from time to time, but we try to be as fair and transparent as possible — especially with established community members. We are having to constantly battle spam bots etc, and only occasionally does that catch legitimate participation.
Appreciate you coming in and clarifying directly. The 90 points data point is useful . it tells me the current post isn't affected which is consistent with Francis clearing the low quality mark on the LLM visibility article yesterday.
The variability point is fair. Some of what I attributed to suppression may have been normal variance. The piece was careful to say that — "I can't prove it" was the framing throughout.
What the thread did surface, regardless of cause: Francis didn't know Sloan comments weren't automatically associated with account flags either. He thought they were. If the most active moderator on the platform has a mistaken model of how the system works, that's the transparency gap in concrete form not bad intent, just incomplete instrumentation on both sides.
Francis's feature requests in this thread are the right next step.
Interesting. I thought that users would be affected if a Sloan comment were to comment on a post.
@ben I am curious if we could add a feature where if you were to flag an account, we give a reason to why we flag it? (textarea that is optional. Similar to the feature of removing a tag under a post)? That way, it would be more transparent and is easier than seeing 50 flags in an account without knowing why. It would also make reviewing easier since we get context to know why that person was flagged in the first place.
I am hoping to have a tool where I can keep track of Sloan messages that I sent since I have to go each one and figure out if the user is abiding the rule and it could get mixed up from other mods using Sloan. Also, it would be a good feature for moderators to figure out who sent the Sloan message in the first place since it is anonymous at the moment, which can be problematic in my opinion if there is a rogue Mod.
Appreciate the mention, Dann! Just a quick update from my end — after Francis unflagged my account, everything's been running normally. The articles I've published since then have been showing up in feeds, getting organic reach, no more unexplained suppression.
So the fix did work. The question you're raising is still valid though — how many people are walking around with active flags and no idea? That's the part worth fixing.
Solid third piece.
I would recommend reaching out to me since I have been mostly active and have been using moderation to the fullest and fair extent. It IS possible that someone out there are flagging accounts without warning, but as @jess mention, I am the most active currently on the platform and it is a good idea to reach out to me on the "Ask a DEV Mod" post about the issue just in case if it was me. If not, I usually direct them to contact the actual team to investigate.
Thanks for everything you do, Francis. You've genuinely been the most active and fastest-responding mod we've seen around here. Appreciate you keeping the door open — people know where to find you if something's up.
I appreciate it! also thanks for the comment you left on my recent post on thinking I am behind on things. I will get around to respond to everyone on there when I can. Feel free to @ me whenever you need me in an appropriate manner!
Excellent follow-up. I especially appreciate how you treat this like an engineering investigation: you document the sequence, identify confounding variables, compare repeated outcomes, and avoid claiming causation where the evidence only supports correlation.
From a systems perspective, this is fundamentally an observability problem. If multiple moderation warnings can produce an account-level state that changes feed, search, or challenge visibility, authors should be able to see when that state is active, what triggered it, and how it can be reviewed. Silent distribution changes make legitimate moderation indistinguishable from ranking variance or platform failure.
The controlled experiment described by xulingfeng makes the transparency gap even harder to dismiss. Moderation can be imperfect, but invisible moderation state leaves authors unable to debug, appeal, or even understand what is happening.
"Observability problem" is the right frame and it's more actionable than "suppression." Suppression implies intent.
Observability is a system property either the state is visible to authors or it isn't and right now it isn't. UnitBuilds just confirmed that moderators can't see the computed rep score either, which means neither authors nor mods have visibility into the metric that determines feed distribution.
Everyone is debugging blind. That's not a moderation policy problem . it's an instrumentation gap that makes the system untrustworthy even when the people running it are acting in good faith.
Well said—the distinction between suppression and observability is important because one assumes motive while the other identifies a concrete system property. If the computed reputation score influences feed distribution, it should be exposed through an explainability layer showing the score, contributing signals, recent changes, and the reason a post’s reach was limited. Moderators should also have access to the same diagnostic data, with appropriate privacy controls and audit logs. Without that instrumentation, support teams cannot distinguish a bug, a ranking penalty, stale data, or legitimate moderation behavior. The people operating the system may be acting entirely in good faith, but the architecture still produces an untrustworthy experience when every participant is debugging blind.
That's a feature spec not just a design principle. Score, contributing signals, recent changes, reason for reach limitation — author-facing with a moderator mirror and audit logs. If that existed, this entire thread wouldn't have needed to happen. xulingfeng wouldn't have needed to run a controlled experiment. Francis wouldn't have been operating on a dashboard that hides the metric his decisions affect. I wouldn't have spent two weeks wondering if the pattern I was seeing was real.
The instrumentation gap is fixable. What this thread has produced — UnitBuilds on the Forem internals, your spec, Francis confirming the low quality mark is actually enough to write a concrete proposal. That might be worth doing.
This is a thoughtful and balanced discussion of a difficult topic. What stands out is that you're not arguing against moderation itself—you're asking for transparency around moderation outcomes that may affect content visibility.
The key issue isn't whether account-level flagging exists; it's whether authors should be informed when it does. If distribution can be impacted by warning thresholds, authors need visibility into that status so they can understand performance changes and take corrective action if necessary.
I also appreciate the distinction between documented facts and personal interpretation throughout the post. Too many conversations about algorithms become assumptions presented as certainty. Here, you've clearly separated what can be verified from what remains speculation.
The examples around challenge visibility, repeated flagging despite disclosures, and tag changes discovered indirectly all point to the same underlying concern: communication. Even if every moderation decision was technically correct, a lack of visibility can leave creators trying to reverse-engineer what happened from engagement patterns.
Transparency doesn't require exposing every moderation rule or ranking signal. But notifying authors when an account-level restriction is active, explaining its duration, and providing a clear path to resolution would go a long way toward building trust between creators and the platform.
An interesting discussion, and one that applies far beyond DEV.to to any platform balancing content quality, moderation, and creator trust.
"Far beyond DEV.to" is where this actually lands. The transparency gap — active moderation state invisible to authors, distribution affected, no notification, no appeal path isn't a DEV.to design choice. It's the default. Most platforms are built this way. DEV.to is just the one where the thread got specific enough to name the mechanism. What UnitBuilds and Hiren mapped out in this thread . The rep score pipeline, the Sloan penalty, the explainability layer as a concrete fix is a spec that applies anywhere content distribution is gated by a score authors can't see.
Transparency matters as much as moderation itself. If account-level flags or distribution limits exist, creators should be informed. Clear feedback helps authors improve, while uncertainty creates confusion and erodes trust between platforms and the communities that contribute to them.
Exactly and the thread below this comment has produced a concrete spec for what that transparency layer would look like. Worth reading if you're interested in the technical side of how it could work.
hola, necesito ayuda con un tema. desarrolle un aplicativo con IA, solo tiene html y otros. no logro que genere un formato de pdf especifico, genera el pdf pero no logro que replique formatos. use markdown para que los lea pero aún asi no puede. ayuda!!