Hi!
So yeah, as the subject line says I recently had t ban a user who was not just under 18, but under 13 years of age. I was contacted directly by PM from one user and another flagged the post there the person said they were only 12.
Looking I saw a lot of people read that post, but did nothing about it, so to clarify something that I suspect might be why I want to explain how the flagging system actually works.
First a screenshot:
As you can see, @Venus has been naughty. I flagged the post as Other… and left a note tor the moderators to not touch the flag or post (so i could make the screenshots). As you can see I have a 67% accuracy on my flags (well it’s actually 100%, but discourse calculates that number weirdly for admins 
)
As you can see @Draculaura also flagged the post as spam. Currently that flag is pending, but as you can see when multiple people flag the same post it collapses it into a single report. Now, because I chose Other… there is a PM thread with the moderators currently. If you choose Other… it creates a PM thread between you and the moderators.
So what happens now? A moderator claims the flag (so we don’t step on each other’s toes), and then we can handle the flag.
In this case, I accepted the flag and kept the post hidden:
If the posts was unhidden, and someone flagged it, you would see another entry from the new flagger but still see the old flags as well.
So why was post hidden? When a post’s score hits a certain level due to flagging it is auto-hidden. If a sufficent number of TL2 or higher users flags the post it will auto-silence the user for 24 hours as well.
So now how this info relates to under age users specifically: If you see someone admitting they are under 18, and especially under 13, flag the post as inappropriate. This serves two purposes. It ensures that the @moderators group will see the post and can deal with it, and more importantly, it ensures we have the legal documentation we need if someone tries to pull something stupid and sue us (and yes that actually happened several years ago)
So please flag such posts and DO NOT ENGAGE WITH THE USER! It makes your life and ours a lot less complicated, especially if they are under 13 as there special rules we have to follow for those accounts due to US laws.