How can I raise flags after having reached 3000 rep? [duplicate]

Question

I finally reached 3000 reputation. So I can now vote to close questions. But since I'm able to do this, I can't flag posts anymore. They are automatically close votes.

So I can't get the Marshal badge anymore, where I must raise 500 helpful flags. But when I take a look at the users which were recently awarded this badge, most of them have over 3k rep.

How can I raise flags which are counted for the badge?

Answer 1

From Close votes privilege page

Note that once you gain the reputation to vote to close, you should no longer flag for moderator attention to have questions closed or migrated. It is your responsibility to vote now.

So now you can not flag a question to close, migrate or reopen it. You have to vote to do the same. And not able to flag a question to close is not the end of the world. We have many more type of flags:

Here clicking on it is a duplicate.. or it should be closed... will redirect you to the close votes popup. So it is not a flag option for 3K+ users. You can also flag answers as well. Also flagging a comment will count as a flag.

Answer 2

Let me tell you a (very open) secret ... There are too many thank you and me too answers (on Stack Overflow) every day which can easily be flagged as Not an Answer.

Answer 3

You could always flag anything else in the system that you cannot handle yourself. Every helpful flag counts towards the badge.

For posts this will of course be

• Spam
• Offensive
• Not an Answer
• Needs ♦ moderator attention

And then there's the possibility to clean up comments. Go looking for too chatty or obsolete ones on older questions. Like people saying just

Thank you, what a great solution!

which would be a too chatty one.

Or this conversation would be obsolete:

There is an error in your answer in line...

Thanks, I fixed it!

Keep in mind though that if there are lots of chatty or obsolete comments on a question or answer you should flag the post for moderator attention and describe the situation instead of flagging each single comment.

Somewhere here on Meta (I cannot find it right now) I saw a statement by a moderator though, saying that you should flag the post only if all of the comments are flag-worthy. If there is one comment worthy to keep, just flag the other comments, but not the post. The reasoning behind that was that there's a moderator tool available that can remove all of the comments at once - which cannot be used if some comments should be deleted while other shall remain.

So you see: There's plenty of opportunity to get the Marshal-badge even after reaching 3k reputation.