Are the new moderator flag limits sufficiently high?

Question

Last month, the flag limits got an increase based on reputation points:

In order to encourage more flagging, we have increased the number of general moderator flags available to 10 per day, plus one per every 1k of reputation, up to a maximum of 100. So if you have 15k reputation, you now have 25 moderator flags to use each day as you see fit. The existing spam and offensive flag allocation of 5 per day has not changed.

As an experiment, for the past few days I've been going to the review page and browsing for a short while. I found that I can invariably find more posts that need attention than I can flag. Mostly these are non-answers found in the "late answers" tab.

My guess is that any user can reach the flag limit in roughly 2 * n minutes or (much) less, where n = number of flags available. I think this is unfortunate, given that our moderators seem to be doing a great job taking care of flags.

Note that I'm lacking some insight as to how important flags are to the moderation process. If there are any statistics on the volume of valid flags requiring moderator action vs. the volume of moderator actions without flags, it would help answer this question. I'm trying to get an idea of how much flags are helping, and potentially how much more they could be helping.

I like an idea in another question which addressed flag limits. I understand that the newly-implemented flag limits are already merit-based. However, I ask:

1. How many users actually use all their flags?
2. Is reputation alone really a good metric by which flag limits should be set? (See item 1.)

My point with these questions is: Given that flags are useful to moderators, users with 10 flags per day who regularly flag 10 posts which legitimately require attention are helping the moderation process much more than users with 25 or even 50 flags who only flag every once in a while (however rare these users may, in reality, be-- I'm not trying to say that the additional flags go unused).

Furthermore, one moderator has expressed in a comment that:

We'd rather have too many flags than not enough.

Especially considering that point, I think it would be a good idea to supplement the new flagging limits with a multiplier based on the "flagging reliability" metric (which was also mentioned in the announcement about the new limits). I understand that this is now already used in weighting flags in the moderator queue, but would it be appropriate to apply flag reliability to the flagging limits as well?

Answer 1

Until a few days ago, the calculation was:

• default 10 per day
• one bonus flag per 1000 reputation
• maximum 100

But we have now tweaked this to consider previous flagging history: flags by people who flag well are OK

so:

• default 10 per day
• one bonus flag per 2000 reputation
• one bonus flag per 20 "flag weight" above the default
• maximum 100

Which then demands the question: what is flag weight?

Simply: it is the way we order flagged posts. Flags by known-good flaggers get seen first. This information is shown on your own profile if it is interesting (not too close the the default, i.e. you've done something worth showing), but basically:

• start at 100
• +10 for a flagged post (+5 for a comment) that we did something about (or was basically valid)
• -10 for a flagged post (-5 for a comment) that we suppressed as invalid
• min 0, max 750 (but non-linear above 500)
• IMPORTANT CHANGE - if you flag so consistently badly that you reach 0 weight, flags will be suppressed

If your flag weight is getting low you can quickly recover it simply by flagging sensibly. "I disagree with this" is a bad reason to flag, as is adding a moderator-message to say "plz answer post is urgent mail me".