Flag declined on bountied unclear question that is very old with no answers, why?

Question

The flagged question with

"I would like to.." but not shown what was done to solve the problem

was declined.

Isn't this question really bad one?

Update:

declined with:

declined - What's REALLY crazy is that someone would bounty this 4 year old, unanswered question. We'll see, I guess...

as a text shows - moderator has read the question and also found the date of the creation was 4 year ago. But he (or she) not found it should be closed

Answer 1

^{Re your edit it seems the Mod did realise this was a bountied question that you wanted closed, however the following still applies}

Remember flags are handled fast, your flag message is more of a cryptic clue than an explanatory text. When flagging, always include the following

• What you want the moderator to do
• Why you want them to do it
• If not blatantly obvious: why you can't do it yourself.

So your flag was likely declined because it looks like someone flagging for ♦ moderator attention because they think the question should be closed -- which is usually the wrong flag to use as it goes to the wrong queue.

A more clear flag message would have been:

This question has a bounty on it and so cannot be closed by the community. However it fails the "minimum understanding of the problem to be solved" requirement. If possible could it have the bounty removed and be closed?

Answer 2

I declined that flag. Here's why:

• It wasn't a great question, but I do believe it is an answerable question. As Tim's edit demonstrates, a little bit of spit-polish goes a long way - you could've done this too. As a general rule, try to handle situations like this yourself before asking someone else to do it - if you're not going to use your "edit everything" privilege, then what good is it?

• As a general rule, I'm very reluctant to revoke bounties. I think it sends the wrong message to folks offering them: note that there's normally no way to retract a bounty. If a question is a real mess, I'll revoke and close - but as I noted above, this wasn't that bad.

• It had 4 years to get closed, but didn't. Until this meta post, there wasn't a single down-vote on the question... Not even one from you. It even managed to escape the automated deletion scripts and attract a bounty from a 3rd-party who was interested in finding an answer! All else being equal, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a question that has made it through such a tough gauntlet.

As others noted, your flag reason sucked if your goal was explicitly to get the bounty revoked and the question closed. You described a possible problem with the question; you should expect that anyone handling such a flag is going to evaluate the problem and take action if they think action is warranted. In this case, I did not, and left my evaluation as a custom decline reason on the flag. Given you didn't edit, vote or comment on the post, I suspect I put more time into declining your flag than you did into reviewing that post - next time, try and change that ratio a bit and you'll likely see more positive results.