Does Discourse permit flagged “off-topic” posts having their flag removed when moved to a new thread?
I think so? I’m honestly a little weak on how the whole flagging system works and how I can respond to flagged posts.
The problem is that Discourse offers a handful of choices for agreeing with, disagreeing with, and ignoring flags. I don’t have them in my head right now, but it’s not uncommon for me to be uncertain which to select, especially because none of the options reflect what I often do, which is delete a portion of a post. I also have trouble when people in an argument start flagging each other’s posts because I might agree with one flag or the other but feel that the community would be best served by shutting the whole thing down.
Do me a favor and flag this post as Off-Topic so I can see what happens. I’ll ignore the flag, but it will let me see what the interface looks like so I can respond back here with a screenshot.
Done. Funny, I flagged another post as off-topic and minutes later you (I assume) split it into a new thread, which is what I was hoping would happen, since I did want to continue the discussion on that new topic. Maybe it was just a case of GMTA. 
OK, here’s what I get with an Off-Topic flagged post. I can say Yes, No, or Ignore. For Yes and Ignore, I get these options:
In this case, I clicked No, since it really wasn’t off-topic, so Discourse told me the flag was rejected. Did you get a notification of that?
It looks like my most common options would be to agree with the flag and either keep the post or edit it. I’d keep it if I planned to break it to its own topic, and edit it not, but there’s no option for breaking it out within the process.
What I don’t get in the moderation is any way of replying in context to the person flagging a post. Maybe if people leave a comment when they flag I can do that? There are times I’d like to explain why I’m approving or rejecting, but I don’t want to take the time to start a conversation from scratch.
With your previous off-topic flag, the fact that I moved it was just happenstance. It jumped out at me, too, because it was a new post in a 6-year-old topic, so I didn’t even notice the flag. :-) So yes, GMTA.
No, I didn’t.
That would probably be a good practice, if a bit awkward. The flagging process itself doesn’t seem to offer any way to leave a comment, other than to send a PM to the author (apparently in lieu of setting a flag).
So the conclusion I’m drawing is that it seems a flag is a permanent attachment to a comment, at least from the perspective of the flagger. Once flagged, the flagger can’t undo their action, and neither can the admin remove the flag.
Thanks for helping sleuth this out!
I’m assuming that the post I made about the Geniatech/Elgato software was flagged but as I researched previously, there was very little regarding that software or hardware in other threads.
It really isn’t off topic since Eyetv3 is still available and is 32 bit while the newer Eyetv4 is not. Whether a thread is old or not shouldn’t matter. If you purchase a newer usb stick, you get codes for both versions according to the web sites and reviews so those who still run Mojave or earlier might benefit from knowing that it’s still out there and that a newer version is also available.
It’s not a problem that you posted it there, but given that both I and @fischej felt it was off-topic, it’s better off as its own topic. I suspected correctly that the replies would focus entirely on these TV devices, so they would have been completely unrelated to the news that Mojave was going to be the last version of macOS to support 32-bit apps.
Overall, it’s better to have more separate topics that don’t contain oodles of posts. That makes it much easier to find specific things later.
Thread age does matter somewhat, not the least because anything in the Article Comments category appears underneath its associated article on the main TidBITS site. I don’t stress about thread age if a post is 100% on topic, but the more the topic has drifted, the more likely I am to split it.
The replies are varying but more than a few talk about Eyetv3 which is 32 bit and last working on Mojave and is on topic in that regard. It could also run in a VM but no one has mentioned that yet.
It doesn’t matter where it’s placed as long as there is a link to the original thread so that those searching at some other point in time can find the newer thread.
Whenever a post is moved in Discourse, it automatically provides a link to the previous location.
All that said, I reserve the right to split topics however I think is most appropriate.