Support Forums: Introduce a "soft" or "watched" flag status

[mrfoxtalbot]

This ties directly to 6834.

During the ​weekly support team chat today, we discussed how we sometimes resort to modwatching users because we suspect they might do something against the guidelines at some point in the future. This feels like the wrong use of that flag and can lead users to be confused or upset since it is not clear what guidelines they actually broke.

At the same time, it is also true that we will see trends in posts and that seasoned moderators are very good at anticipating "bad stuff" but do not have an effective way to keep an eye on these users other than modwatching them.

To bridge this gap, we could create an intermediate "soft" flag that would not have any effect on the user's ability to post, but would list these users' posts alongside the ones that need moderation just to help us keep an eye on them. These "watched" posts could be in a different color, just to distinguish them easily.

[sterndata]

This is a very sensible idea! One slight addition --- clear the soft flag after some interval like a month.

[bcworkz]

clear the soft flag after some interval like a month.

or after x number of topics/replies, whichever comes first (or last?)