I don’t know all what happened with that, the whole site is more complex than just the forum. Those questions you wrote I don’t have the answers for but you could ask in a help ticket and maybe they will reply.
This discourse forum platform is free open source, but they have it hosted on their own servers integrated with the rest of the site I don’t know anything about how all that works.
Have launched my own forum with this platform 2 members have signed up so far who I’ve appointed to be moderators, Dan from Nova Scotia and Simon from Edinburgh. Hopefully will have more people sign up over the next few months but right now is in staff-only setup mode so not open to new-users until I can pay more for discourse server hosting costs $100 a month on San Jose servers but only $25 for staff-only login.
With the flags those can be used to just report something as being off-topic, then moderators may just move some comments to a different category to make things more understandable for new people so things don’t look like complete chaos from the outside.