There's also a lock icon next to the "App not working" category in the header, which I took to mean that that entire category is hidden from logged-out users (which experimentally seems to be the case).
I have the impression from this thread that this thread was public (as in, would work if you just linked to it from something like HN) earlier, and now it isn't?
Obviously, deliberately hiding a negative story on our Discourse is a little like deleting a bad tweet; it's just going to guarantee someone captures and boosts it. We have a lot of flaws! But not knowing how the Internet works probably isn't one of them. No idea what's going on here, still trying to work it out.
Yes, from the Google-cached version, it appears that the thread previously didn't have the app-not-working tag; it was only tagged with "rails".
Not going to try and guess why or when that tag change happened. Personally, I'm less concerned with this particular thread than with the apparent decision to systematically hide all potentially-negative threads from search engines.
That category was added after one of our support folks replied, likely for tracking. I don't know why it's private. They may not even know this category is private. Hiding negative shit wasn't a deliberate decision... we're aware of google cache and we don't need to give HN another reason to dunk on us.
> That category was added after one of our support folks replied
FYI, this doesn't appear to be strictly accurate. The OP commented at 23:52 UTC saying that the thread had been made private, and the reply from "Sam-Fly" was not posted until 02:36 UTC.
My point was that the app-not-working category is used in conjunction with support/our team getting involved. I assume this is what Sam meant by "flagged it internally", which was followed by investigation, then a post. I don't see how the timestamps uncover something nefarious.
