Flags, disputes and governance

Cabdell has no downvotes. Weak work simply receives no votes and sinks. Content that is unacceptable, such as plagiarism, spam or fabricated data, is handled differently: by flags. Flags are not votes. When enough of them are raised, the article becomes disputed, a jury of people qualified in its field decides whether to clear it or retract it, and governance carries out the outcome.

This page explains the rules, which the Cabdell contract (the program on the blockchain) enforces. To raise a flag, see Flag an article. Blockchain terms are explained in the glossary.

Contract v4

These are the rules of contract v4 (decision D-163), the candidate for MainNet. They came out of an adversarial audit of the earlier contract (D-162), which showed that disputes were too cheap to start and too easy to abuse, and were amended the same day so that an author gains nothing by disputing their own article. A new contract version is a new application, so TestNet restarts with a v4 application.

Who can flag

To flag an article you need, in the article’s primary field:

• at least 10 reputation;
• a reputation record that is at least 30 days old. The record is created by your first review, comment or reputation claim in that field, and the contract counts the days from then. Reputation earned in a hurry therefore cannot be used to flag at once.

In addition:

• you are not a confirmed author of the article (a declared co-author who has not confirmed may flag);
• the article is not retracted;
• you have not flagged it yet in the current round (see Rounds).

When your account cannot flag yet, the web app says why. You choose a reason (plagiarism, spam, fabricated data or other), may add a note for the jurors, and confirm with “Confirm: flag this article”. A flag is a signed, public and permanent record.

What a flag costs

Every flag pays two amounts, in the same group of transactions:

Amount	ALGO	What happens to it
storage deposit for the flag’s record	0.0297	comes back to the flagger when the flag is settled
bond	1, or more after a cleared dispute (below)	held by the contract until the flag is settled, then returned to the flagger, or paid in part to the article’s submitter, or kept (see Where the bonds go)

The flag that opens a dispute pays 0.0073 ALGO more, for the record of the round’s outcome, which stays for good. On top comes the network fee, 0.002 ALGO with an ordinary wallet. See Costs and deposits.

The bond is what makes a flag a serious act: whoever flags an article that is then cleared loses the bond.

After a cleared dispute the bond doubles. Each time governance clears a dispute about the article (a clearance), the bond of the next flags on that article doubles: 2 ALGO after the first clearance, then 4, 8 and at most 16. It stays doubled for 365 days after the last clearance, then falls back to 1 ALGO. The number of clearances is kept, so a clearance after those 365 days doubles again from it: an article cleared twice, and cleared again two years later, asks a bond of 8 ALGO for the following year. A dispute that expires (below) is not a clearance. The bond a flag deposited is recorded with it, so it is the amount that is later returned or kept.

How much a flag weighs

A flag weighs like a vote, 1 plus the square root of your reputation in the article’s primary field, rounded down, but never more than 10 (see Reputation and vote weight). Since a flagger needs reputation 10 or more, every flag weighs at least 4, and a flag reaches the cap of 10 at reputation 81.

Because of the cap, no single person can dispute an article, nor can two: a dispute needs at least three people.

When an article becomes disputed

When the flags of the current round add up to 30, the article becomes disputed. This happens by itself, in the same transaction as the flag that reaches 30; nobody decides it. The threshold is always 30: earlier disputes never raise it.

Flaggers	Weight of each flag	Total
7 people with reputation 10	4	28: not yet disputed
8 people with reputation 10	4	32: disputed
5 people with reputation 25	6	30: disputed
3 people with reputation 81 or more	10	30: disputed
2 people with reputation 10 000	10	20: not disputed, whatever their reputation

Only an article that is a preprint, under review or a closed version can become disputed. The status it had is remembered, so that it can be restored, and so is the moment the dispute started: the 14-day and 60-day limits below count from it.

Rounds

Flags are counted in rounds. Every article starts in round 1, and a round starts with its first flag.

• Each address flags once per round. Flags are permanent: they cannot be withdrawn.
• A round lapses when it has not become a dispute 30 days after its first flag. Its flags then no longer count; the next flag starts a new round, and everyone may flag again. A disputed round never lapses. The notes of a round that lapsed are not shown on the site (they stay on the blockchain): what a round that never became a dispute alleged is not published on its own word.
• Flags raised while the article is already disputed are recorded and keep adding up in the round, but change nothing more. They carry a bond like any other flag.
• When a dispute ends, a new round starts from zero. The flags of earlier rounds stay on record, with their notes, but no longer count.
• The last possible round (round 65 535) accepts no flags, so no article can ever be stuck in a dispute that cannot be resolved.

What changes during a dispute

A dispute is a label and a jury case, not a freeze. Only one thing stops:

Stops while disputed	Continues while disputed
new versions, so that the jury judges the article as it stands	votes for the article, its reviews and its comments
	reputation claims
	resolving comments
	confirming co-authorship
	reviews, comments and replies
	flags (recorded, see above)
	claiming the article token, declaring a DOI
	the submitter’s own retraction

The Peer-reviewed seal is suspended: an article that held it shows “Peer-reviewed, suspended”. The article stays readable, and the feed shows it with a warning.

How a dispute ends

A jury of seven people qualified in the field is drawn at random, in a way anyone can check, and decides by two thirds of at least five answers within 14 days. Without an outcome a second jury is drawn; if that one reaches none either, governance decides alone and publishes its reasons (nothing is cleared by default). Governance then carries out the outcome on the blockchain. Until something ends it, the article stays disputed.

The contract knows four ways out of a dispute:

Outcome	Who	When	What happens
cleared	governance	at any time	the article returns to the status it had before the dispute (preprint, under review or closed version); counts as a clearance
retracted by governance	governance	only once 14 days have passed since the dispute started	the article is retracted, exactly as if its author had retracted it: it stays readable and is permanently marked, its article token is revoked, and reputation its authors had not claimed is lost
retracted by the submitter	the submitter	at any time	the same retraction, chosen by the author
expired	anyone	once 60 days have passed since the dispute started	the article returns to the status it had before the dispute; it is not a clearance

When governance resolves a dispute, either way, it records the CID (the fingerprint, see the glossary) of a published text giving its reasons; the contract refuses a resolution without one. The 14-day wait means that a retraction can never be rushed, even with a stolen governance key. The 60-day expiry means that a dispute nobody resolves ends: the article is restored, whatever a jury decided, and the flaggers’ bonds are kept by the application.

Every way out starts a new round of flags from zero. Each is a public record on the blockchain, which names who ended the dispute and how.

Where the bonds go

The bonds of a round are settled once the round is over: after its dispute ended, or after it lapsed. The contract decides where each bond goes, from how the round ended:

How the round ended	To the flagger	To the article’s submitter	Kept by the application
governance retracted the article	the whole bond	nothing	nothing
the submitter retracted the disputed article	the whole bond	nothing	nothing
the round lapsed: 30 days without a dispute	the whole bond	nothing	nothing
governance cleared the article	nothing	half the bond	the other half
the dispute expired after 60 days	nothing	nothing	the whole bond

In every case the flag’s own storage deposit (0.0297 ALGO) goes back to the flagger. What the application keeps stays in its account for ever: the contract has no way to pay it out to anyone, so it is in effect burned.

If the author retracts the article before its flags reach the threshold, that round never becomes a dispute: it lapses 30 days after its first flag, and the bonds go back to the flaggers.

Nothing moves by itself. Someone has to send the settlement of each flag (the contract method settle_flag) once its round is over. Anyone may send it, for any flag, and pays only its network fee (0.003 ALGO when half the bond goes to the submitter, 0.002 otherwise). Whoever sends it, the money goes where the table says. A flag is settled only once, and nothing can be settled while its dispute is still open.

One case differs. When the flagger has closed their Algorand account and the round was cleared or expired, the flag’s deposit is too small to be paid to an empty account: it goes with the submitter’s half (cleared), or is kept too (expired). Otherwise a flagger could block the settlement by closing the account.

Why the bonds are split

An author could otherwise dispute their own article with accounts of their own, have the dispute cleared or left to expire, and take the bonds back. Under these rules the attempt always costs them: half of every bond when governance clears the dispute, all of it when it expires, and the article is no harder to dispute afterwards, since the threshold stays at 30. Honest flaggers of an article that is then retracted get their bonds back in full, doubled bonds included.

What a false dispute costs

Three flaggers at the cap of 10 put 3 ALGO at stake, plus their deposits (which come back) and the 0.0073 ALGO record of the outcome (which stays). If governance clears the dispute, the article’s submitter receives 1.5 ALGO and 1.5 ALGO are kept; for a year the next flags on that article deposit 2 ALGO each. If the dispute expires, all 3 ALGO are kept. If the article is retracted, the flaggers get their bonds and deposits back.

Governance

Governance is a single address, recorded in the contract, with these powers only:

• registering new fields: the OECD list of 42 fields is already registered (see Fields);
• resolving disputes: cleared at any time, or retracted once 14 days have passed since the dispute started, each with the CID of its published reasons, and only for an article that flags have put in dispute. Since D-151 it carries out the outcome of the dispute’s jury, and decides alone, with public reasons, only when no jury could decide;
• handing its role to a new address, in two steps: the current governance proposes the new address, and the new address accepts by signing. Until it accepts nothing changes, so a mistyped address, or one nobody can sign for, can never take over; the application’s own address is refused. A new proposal replaces the earlier one. This is how governance will move to a multi-signature account later.

What governance cannot do

• edit, hide or delete any article, version, review, comment, vote or flag;
• change the rules: the contract has no update path, and the account that deployed it has no privileges left;
• start a dispute, retract an article that is not disputed, or retract one sooner than 14 days after its dispute started;
• keep an article disputed for ever: anyone can end a dispute 60 days after it started;
• give or remove reputation;
• touch the deposits or the bonds held by the application, or what it keeps, or move anyone’s article token: each bond goes only where the contract sends it;
• remove or rename a field: fields are only ever added.

Every governance action is an event on the blockchain, so its full history can be rebuilt by anyone. The governance address of each network is listed in Networks and addresses.

The governance key

Governance is a post-quantum account: it signs with Falcon-1024, a signature scheme available on Algorand since version 5.0, so that it stays secure even against future quantum computers. It pays its own fees, which for a Falcon signature are three times the usual minimum.

• One per network. TestNet and MainNet have separate governance accounts, never shared.
• TestNet. The key was generated by a project script on the owner’s computer and is kept outside the repository. TestNet coins have no value, and the fields had to be registered with many signatures, so convenience was chosen.
• MainNet. The key is to be generated with Algorand’s algokey tool and its backup held offline by the owner; this is to be confirmed again before MainNet opens.
• One signer for now. Governance is a single signer until Algorand offers post-quantum multi-signature accounts. It will then move to one by proposing that account, which accepts by signing.

Known limits

• The threshold is 30 whatever the article’s activity. It is meant to be revisited after observing real activity.
• Governance is one signer until post-quantum multi-signature accounts exist. The jury decides; governance carries out, and any act against a jury’s outcome is shown on the dispute page. In a later phase the contract will take the verdict itself.
• A dispute that governance leaves open for 60 days expires: the article is restored even if a jury decided to retract it, and the flaggers lose their bonds, which nobody receives.
• The rules are fixed in the contract. Changing a number, such as the bond or the 30-day age of a flagger’s reputation, means deploying a new contract.