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Cancel misclicked flags
Can we have a way to undo a flag?

I flagged a question as not an answer because it (at first) looked like it was a "comment" on the correct answer from the original asker. After further review I could see it was actually an answer, and I wished to cancel my flag request. But there is no mechanism to do that.

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  • Why would you need to?
    – user102937
    Commented Feb 8, 2012 at 22:43
  • possible duplicate of Cancel misclicked flags. There are also a bunch of others.
    – Grant Thomas
    Commented Feb 8, 2012 at 22:44
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    1) One has a limited number of flags to use, and 2) I don't want to waste the moderator's time.
    – alord1689
    Commented Feb 8, 2012 at 22:44
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    Bad flags are rare, so they only waste a little bit of the mods' time. I would simply be a little more careful about casting your flags. :)
    – user102937
    Commented Feb 8, 2012 at 22:46

1 Answer 1

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Every feature request is evaluated using (more or less) the following criteria:

  1. How much will it cost to implement, and
  2. How much benefit will accrue?

For this particular feature, the cost far outweighs the benefit.

What does a bad flag cost? Nothing to the flagger, not really. The benefit of good flagging is your flags are given a higher priority in the moderator queue. If a user abuses the flag system, and they get a large number of declined flags, their flags will simply not show up in the moderator queue anymore.

Allowing people to cancel their flags, on the other hand, would require writing a whole new subsystem to show you your flags, allow you to check off the one(s) you want dismissed, and write the changes to the database. All this for a very small (it's on the order of 1 percent) number of flags that a bad flagger wouldn't bother to correct anyway.

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    If you simply gave us access to the database, we could do it by hand, and save you the cost of implementation.
    – Pollyanna
    Commented Feb 8, 2012 at 23:03
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    @AdamDavis hey, that's a good idea. We should totally do that.
    – Rebecca Chernoff Mod
    Commented Feb 8, 2012 at 23:13
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    Since the "whole new subsystem to show you your flags" now exists, perhaps the two criteria are now more evenly balanced?
    – Lord_Farin
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 7:49

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