What are the best ways to find answers that should be flagged or edited?

Question

I've been experimenting with the flagging system for the last couple of days. I have learned a few strategies, but I feel that I'm making little difference to the mountain of accumulated rubbish.

Having easily run out of my 48 flags within a few minutes tonight, I am now helpless for another 19 hours and thought I would share a couple of tips for finding likely posts to flag with the rest of you, to help keep our poor moderators busy and entertained.

1. The simplest: Look at the first posts of new users. Apart from general scanning, if they have a negative score, they're very likely to be comments or question updates.
2. Search: body:"same problem". This finds bucketloads of "Me too!! Any progress?" answers.
3. Search: body:bump. Gets lots of thread-bumping non-answers.

A couple of thoughts:

• If there was a way to search only within answers, not questions, then other searches, like 'update', to find updates posted as answers, would probably be effective.
• If it was possible to add regex matches like start of line (^), then searches like 'bump' would be much more effective.

Please post any other ideas you have found that make finding detritus easier. There's more than enough junk out there for everyone... Anything we can do to make it easier to spot improves the editing efficiency of the collective.

Answer 1

This is more for laughs than anything else, and doesn't really answer your question, since they are more candidates for editing than flagging, but here goes:

• With this many questions, we have a great deal of misspelling. For example:
  • dinamically (5,566)
  • choosen (5,636)
  • facebok (221), facbook (303), faebook (17)
  • cant (220k), doest (1,710), aint (1,903), wont (106k), wouldnt (5,587)
  • jqury (1), jqueery (0), jquey (7), jqery (66)
  • javscript (3,086)
  • sqllite (4,780)
  • goggle (1,421)
  • teh (8,400+)
  • proble (1,341) and problam (308)
  • datbase (1,200+)
  • recieve (33k)
  • acheive (27k)
  • definately (3,430)
  • wierd (6,300+)
  • framwork (2,600+) and libray (1,481)
  • firfox (373), firefo (33), frefox (14) and chrom (1,510), crhome (83), crome (765)
• We also have a lot of "alot"s - Search More than 32,000!
• And a great many SOLVED!!! questions: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=title%3Asolved
• We are very suggestive: try this (682k) and check this (141k)
• Some users like to be friendly!
  • hey guys (9,300+)
  • dear friends (330)
  • sir (3,309)
  • thanks (2.9M!!) (and tanks (1,512))
  • good morning (5,100+), good afternoon (4,200+) and good evening (2,500+)

Pro tip: if you have less than 2k rep, go edit these posts, or better yet, build a bot to edit these posts, for massive rep gain!

And for hardcore editors, if you want to somewhere to start, go append views:1000 to those search terms for the posts receiving Google visitors. These posts should receive the most attention.

Answer 2

For the search results to contain only answers, add isaccepted:0, which restricts the results to non-accepted answer posts, i.e:

isaccepted:0 +body:"same problem"

Here's two more I've found useful:

isaccepted:0 +body:"help me"
isaccepted:0 +body:"plz"

Answer 3

Another useful query for non-answers is body:anyone isaccepted:0:

https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=body%3Aanyone+isaccepted%3A0

Update:

In addition to "any idea":

https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=body%3A%22any+idea%22+isaccepted%3A0

which had a good number of non-answers (before everyone cleaned those out), another trigger phrase is "thanks in advance":

https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=body%3A%22thanks+in+advance%22+isaccepted%3A0

Aside from when people are being quoted, the latter phrase really has no place in an answer.

Answer 4

Random has provided a query (written by sysadmin1138) that finds answers that have a comment that includes "not an answer" at https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/1040/finding-bad-answers-through-comments. I would like one for "should be a comment" also. Many of the answers I am flagging today have such comments already, which were never acted on.

Edit: Having used up most of the "not an answer" and "should be a comment" I am now working through https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=relevance&q=isaccepted%3a0%20%2burgent%22

Edit2: in addition to urgent, it seems that guys, cheers, and worked are popular in non-answers. Also dear (often addressing the OP asking for teh codez), any luck and any one (just plain anyone is listed in another answer already.)

Came across one that puzzled me and when I searched, it has lots of siblings: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%22does+not+meet+our+quality+standards%22 Unbelievable. They get around the quality filter by pasting in the actual error message.

Answer 5

Late Answers usually have a lot of "This doesn't work for me" and "Thanks this works" answers.

Can find some spam in there also sometimes.

Answer 6

Reputation-Related Commentary

• is:answer isaccepted:0 body:"post comments"

  Many people are strangely forthright about the fact that they should have posted a comment.

• is:answer accepted:0 body:"please upvote me"

• is:answer accepted:0 body:"please upvote my"

  People shouldn't beg for upvotes in their answers.

• is:answer accepted:0 body:"enough rep" (265 results!)

  People really shouldn't be talking about how much reputation they have (or need) in their answers!

Follow-Up "Questions" and Duplicates

• is:answer isaccepted:0 body:"have another question"

  This gives a surprising number of "answers".

• is:answer body:"same question"

  Answers with the phrase "same question" are often simply pointing out duplicates and should be comments instead.

Miscellaneous

• is:answer body:"Does anyone"

  This really shouldn't be in an answer unless it's quoting the original question or is a link to another question on Stack Overflow.

• is:answer body:"appreciate it"

  This isn't as consistent as searching for "Does anyone", but I'd say that about 1 in 4 hits is still not an answer.

• is:answer isaccepted:0 body:"I'm sorry"

  For some strange reason, people also like to apologize a lot.

Answer 7

I was able to find quite a few using is:answer body:"one more question".

This is often an answer that should be a new question, especially if it also contains "thanks" or similar.

I also found quite a lot of should-be comments/close votes using is:answer body:"this is a duplicate", most of them only containing a link to the duplicate question. is:answer body:"duplicate" url:"*stackoverflow.com/*" also works quite well.

Answer 8

isaccepted:0 +body:"how can i" helped me find plenty.

Likewise did isaccepted:0 +body:"thanks in advance"

Answer 9

One search that seems to get a lot of posts that just link to other questions without any additional info is

is:answer url:"*stackoverflow.com*"

Answer 10

These searches mostly find old bad answers, so they are great for cleaning up the site, but within a few days enough people will have used them and flag the worse answers they show.

The danger is that lot of people will start from the first result page, and therefore the first few pages will get lots of flags, then everyone will run out of flags – so it would be better if the search results come back in random order.

(I hope the mods that cope with the flag storm this may create….)

Answer 11

I am getting a lot from

https://stackoverflow.com/search?page=19&tab=relevance&q=body%3a%22could%20you%22%20isaccepted%3a0

As I will not have time over the next week or so to check the other 300 pages of results, someone else can get the flag weight for these. I have been finding about 3 or 4 none answers per page of results.

(I got up to page 19, don't all start looking at page 20! choose a ramdom page to start from)

Answer 12

One more: I would like to. Now 4795 answers. 3738 are not accepted.

(99 are "I would like to recommend", which seems legitimate. There might some other good ones in them, too.)