KA overhiding comments

I agree that it is very frustrating for the app to hide posts/comments because of a link to another part of Khan Academy's own site.  I can think of no reason that links to other parts of Khan Academy should be hidden, and would hope that Khan Academy will figure out a way to stop requiring posts with such links to get manually approved.

I am unfamiliar with posts or comments being hidden for being too long.  Where does that happen?

~ Janice

Hi 𝕜𝕚𝕒𝕒𝕟𝕥𝕠𝕝𝕚𝕒,

Thanks for sharing this!

I definitely understand how it can be frustrating to have your comments auto-hidden. There's a long list of criteria that our auto-moderation system checks for each post, and sometimes innocent posts can get caught up by these filters.

I reviewed your account and only found 1 hidden Tips & Thanks post from the last 3 months (it was flagged as too short), and 1 hidden Comment from the last 30 days (it was the qa_expand issue). If there's other specific posts that you think are getting hidden, could you please send me the links? I can run them through our filters to see why they are getting hidden.

re: Reactions on comments. All of the post types (except Comments) allow you to upvote/downvote them. We have a filter that allows us to see highly downvoted posts, so downvoting without flagging does help surface posts to our team. For Comments though, flagging is currently the only option.

re: Automatically unhide comments when there are coding terms or long blocks of code detected. Detecting code in comments is really tricky to do, which is unfortunately why our filters don't always play nicely with posts that contain code. Usually, posts that are hidden with code are hidden because of a long word or a URL-like string. So you will want to look out for long variables names and object properties or CSS. (Ex. "overflow:hidden" will be hidden, but "overflow: hidden" is fine.)

re: Instead of autohiding comments all the time, it could only autoflag, and then if a guardian checks it out and it is a unhelpful post then they can manually hide it. This is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how we would be able to implement it. Detecting good vs. bad posts is already a difficult problem, so I think adding on "to hide vs. not to hide" would only make things more complex. I would also be worried about this having an unintended consequence of flooding the comments with even more spam (there's already a TON of spam that's auto-flagged that you never see!)

Posts with "qa_expand" getting auto-flagged is definitely a bug. Links to khanacademy.org pages should not be auto-flagged. I've shared this with the team so they can look into it.

Thanks again!

Evan Lewis -

Thanks for reading through! The ones I mentioned I actually deleted after I realized they were hidden, and re wrote it in a more concise way.

Reactions on comments -  Ok I didn't know that was a thing! That's great too know, I just thought it stopped at 0

Automatically unhide comments when there are coding terms or long blocks of code detected  -  What about detecting if things have ``` (indicating a long block of code). Maybe it could auto-flag but not auto hide? I don't know how the system works

Instead of autohiding comments all the time, it could only autoflag, and then if a guardian checks it out and it is a unhelpful post then they can manually hide it -  Yeah, I could understand it's a lot of work to implement. But for the qa_expand key, the reason is after the question mark, the qa expand key gets unpermalinked, so I guess the long string of letters and numbers gets flagged as spam

Janice Holz - I agree about the in KA links. But I would add maybe unhide links known to be safe, non-social media learning websites like w3schools? Also, for your comment about when it gets hidden, whenever the bot detects spam - long blocks of text without spaces, censored words, etc. But sometimes the bot makes a mistake, thats what I was referring too. It gets hidden until a moderator manually unhides it