Flagging content (as "inappropriate", etc.) without censoring

As far as I know, there are two contributed modules that deals with flagging of content:

http://drupal.org/project/abuse , and
http://drupal.org/project/flag_content

The ongoing "global" debates about moderation, cencorship and "anonymity" are quite interesting, and by no means trivial or posing any obvious "right answers". All alternatives come with somewhat undesired side effects. However, I would say that at least as an option, any such system should offer some kind of configurability regarding the visibility of flagged content, so that the site administrators can use them with "any kind of policy".

So I think one of the most useful features would be the ability to "hide" comments that have a certain amount of flags, and enable users to know where there are flagged comments (for whatever reason), and easily get to see them. In these AJAX times, that can be done by collapsing flagged comments by default, and provide a link to expand/show the "hidden" comment with only one-click-without-extra-page-load.

So, my question is this:

Can this be done with a contributed module without changing any core functionality?

If not, the necessary core adjustments to facilitate such a feature might be suiteable as a suggestion for Drupal 6. ( ref. http://drupal.org/node/148757 )

Ref. Tim O'Reilly's recent post where he summons up the feedback he got since he invited to debate the "codes of conduct" for bloggers and communities back in March this year:

"O'Reilly Radar > Code of Conduct: Lessons Learned So Far

"Slashdot's moderation system may also be a good model. It uses community moderators to promote or demote comments to help discriminate between valuable comments and noise, but allows the reader to set his own threshold for what he or she wants to see.

So rather than a blogger's code of standards, perhaps what I ought to be calling for is moderation systems integrated with the major blogging platforms.

John at librarything wrote:

"One technical suggestion, employed by my employer: letting users flag inappropriate comments, which then become click-to-see. This lowers the visibility of the trolls, without censoring them. For an example, see this thread:

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=8702

Message 5 is no longer immediately visible, because it was flagged by a certain number of users as inappropriate. But it can still be seen, if you want to, by clicking on the 'show' link. It's a compromise, but perhaps a practical one.

Similarly, it might help the situation to let users configure whether or not they want to see flagged content, and set the default for flagged content to some sort of reduced visibility.

I really like this, as it addresses one of the biggest hesitations I personally have about deleting comments, namely that deleting part of a conversation can make it impossible to reconstruct what really went on. And there have also been problems in the past with blog owners selectively editing conversations to present themselves in the best possible light. A mechanism that preserves comments while hiding them "in the back room" so to speak would seem to me to be a really useful tool.

I immediately wrote John about the availability of the code, and he said it was from "LibraryThing's groups/talk section, which was built in-house. Tying comment visibilty to user flagging was added last year, in response to a spate of abusive behavior." But more importantly, he added, "Creating blog plugins for this is a great idea," and offered to help anyone who wanted to do it. I've introduced him to the folks at Movable Type, Wordpress, and Blogger, and hopefully we can get something going.

Comment moderation by the community of readers, especially when offensive comments are not deleted but merely made less visible, seems to me to be much better than top-down deletion by the site owner, even if the latter may sometimes be the only way to keep the conversation from going off the rails."

Source: O'Reilly Radar > Code of Conduct: Lessons Learned So Far