Please make the flag response UI consistent, and train moderators

Question

First a bit of rant history:

1. When I became a moderator, there were two responses to flags: valid or invalid. There was no formal definition of these two terms; I took “valid” to mean “you were right to bring this to our attention” (regardless of whether I ended up choosing the resolution requested in the flag) and “invalid” to mean “so what? I can't do anything about this situation”.

2. A few weeks ago, the wording was changed to “helpful” and “declined”. There was no prior explanation of the change (hence Robert's question). On the face of Jeff's response, it seems that my interpretation was right — but based on the names alone, I would have thought that I should be using “declined” more often (whenever I'd decline to do anything).

3. A few days ago, moderators were publicly berated for declining too many flags. Or maybe this was just meant as a clarification — I'm honestly not sure if this was meant as a reproach to the community moderators, but it sure felt like one. And it didn't clarify anything for me: was my interpretation of valid/invalid right? Or should I just forget the “decline” button exists?

4. As of this morning, moderators must enter a reason for declining flags, but cannot enter a reason for marking as helpful. Now I'm really confused.

• Is the mandatory feedback supposed to introduce friction so that moderators don't decline flags? In that case, I have a simpler solution: remove the “declined” button.

• Are the two resolutions now “don't provide feedback” and “provide feedback”? In which case, please change the wording on the buttons. There are plenty of helpful flags for which I'd like to provide feedback (“We don't do community wiki for that kind of stuff any more, please read The Future of Community Wiki, I'll close the question because it doesn't look salvageable.” Or “Yes, this question is off-topic here, but the mods on X don't want it either so I won't migrate.”). Conversely, there are plenty of unhelpful flags which don't require any feedback other than “WTF”.

• Should we keep using “declined” as before and write a user script that automatically feeds “WTF” as the reason?

So, my support request is: please tell us how we're supposed to respond to flags. Preferably before making UI changes. And make the UI internally consistent.

Answer 1

It's probably a lost cause, but here's what I would have liked to see instead:

That is to say:

• Keep the existing definitions
• Add an optional comment field for helpful or unhelpful flags
• Include a button or drop-down to add the existing pro-forma comments.

When a flag makes no sense at all (for example, some users flag their question to say "this question is great!" - true story), forcing an explanation is just stopping the proceedings with idiocy. This alternative would have been a convenient way to give feedback without forcing moderators into a specific and usually sub-optimal workflow.

I fear that as it is right now, most moderators will just accept every flag in order to avoid the hassle of going through the decline motions, thus weakening the entire flag weight system (which, as I seem to recall, was originally supposed to be for the benefit of the moderators). Not to mention that the ones who do decide to be helpful will probably be subjected to confrontational meta posts.

Answer 2

To play Devil's Advocate here...I don't really see a problem with this. I've often been uncomfortable at declining a flag without being able to provide a reason why.

For example, not being able to communicate to a user that flagging a post just because it's wrong is a bad flag.

I'm all for a bit more transparency when it comes to moderator actions that negatively affect a user in some way, it's educational and will hopefully alter their behaviour positively without us having to push the "Contact User" button.

It's also good because then the user doesn't feel he/she has to raise a question on Meta and draw unwanted attention to their flagging activities (even if they are mostly well placed flags).

Ultimately we need to try out stuff like this if SE is to continue being innovative in creating Q&A sites that produce a good signal to noise ratio. This might or might not work, but until we've run with it for a bit we'll not really know.

Answer 3

Is the mandatory feedback supposed to introduce friction so that moderators don't decline flags?

I handled 2,700 flags on Stack Overflow last quarter (and I'm still barely #5 by moderator flag handling stats!). Of that, I declined between 1 and 2 percent.

The reality is that decline should be rare -- and they should be flags you feel strongly about declining. In that case, the UI now reflects this: the common 99% action is easy and fast, and the 1% action requires a bit more work.

Also "friction" means three clicks instead of one, if one of the pre-filled decline reasons works for you. (And we can certainly add more pre-filled declines to reflect common cases.)

Are the two resolutions now “don't provide feedback” and “provide feedback”?

No -- the normal "helpful" flag case requires no feedback. As Kev said in his comment, "I can't really see a scenario where I'd want to explain helpful behaviour because surely that should be the norm. Much like I wouldn't expect to be stopped by the security guard at my local Tesco to be thanked for not jumping the checkout with an armful of Special Brew and 200 fags."

What are you going to tell them? "Great job!" "Keep up the good work!"

And if you really want to provide feedback, leave a comment on the post. One reason I don't care for secret moderator messaging functions, except when they are unavoidable, is that nobody learns from a private message. It's another dumb information silo trapping information that could be useful to teach the entire community.

(Negative feedback has to be private, because otherwise you are slapping users in public -- and I hope nobody's in favor of that..)

Should we keep using “declined” as before

If you feel strongly a flag should be declined, decline it.

However, it has been my experience in clearing thousands and thousands of flags on Stack Overflow that the vast majority of flags are people genuinely trying to be helpful.