On the SMF forum you were able to report a post, which notified the moderators that it might not be suitable for the forum. Discourse takes this a step further.
If you click on the three dots ‘some more’ menu below a post you’ll see a flag icon ‘flag this post’. Clicking on it gives you a number of options…
- You can choose to open a discussion with the sender about the content. In this case the moderators don’t see that you’ve done that.
- You can flag it as Inappropriate or Spam in which case the moderators will be notified to look at it.
- You can flag it as ‘Something else’. In this case you get a box to fill in explaining why you’ve flagged it.
There is another side to flagging. If enough people flag a message then it gets automatically hidden until it can be reviewed by a moderator. So if enough people see and flag spam overnight when all the mods are asleep/away then it can be hidden away just by non-moderators flagging it. This is just one of the ways that Discourse discourages spammers.