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It turned out that my question was asked as a misunderstanding. It now (after clarification) brings zero value to the community. So I have deleted it.

I was surprised to see this right after that:

A Super User question stating that it was flagged as spam or offensive, locked, and deleted by trejder.

Excuse moi, but is somebody kidding me? I did not flagged anything as rude or abusive! I simply deleted my question, because it has no value. This decision has nothing to do with my content being spam or abusive.

Why is the system claiming that I did something that I actually didn't?Or what am I missing here?

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  • 3
    As far as I can tell, the check for the "deleted as spam or offensive" notice simply checks to see if the question is deleted, locked (deleting a question migrated from another site will lock it as a rejected migration), and has one or more helpful red flags (red flags are marked helpful on post deletion of any type). It doesn't check the post history to see if it was actually deleted for that reason; it just checks for those three things. See another case where this happened - in that case, due to faulty URL stripping logic, one couldn't view other pages of answers to it.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Feb 26, 2023 at 22:57
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    Fwiw, the spam flag is cleared and I did a regular mod delete. With no answers you ought to have been able to do a regular delete tho. Behavior is a little borked here
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Feb 26, 2023 at 23:27
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    Actually, there's something quite fishy going on. Looking at the timeline Someone flagged it as rude/offensive. It was declined. Somehow deletion validated the flag? I cleared the flag and redeleted but the spam flag that caused the post banner was declined and should not have had any effect. Its a bug I think
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Feb 27, 2023 at 0:10
  • @JourneymanGeek A quick test: post an answer to the Formatting Sandbox through your main account. Have Aibobot flag it as offensive. Decline the flag through your main account. Finally, delete the answer. Ask another non-mod if it shows up masked as spam/offensive (mods are exempt from masking).
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Feb 27, 2023 at 0:17
  • Assuming it also happens for answers.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Feb 27, 2023 at 0:27
  • @JourneymanGeek You could try it on a new question here instead of using an answer to that post, if that test fails.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Feb 27, 2023 at 1:12
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    I'm quite happy to chalk this down to a bug - no real point poking around till I know there's someone looking at it, and I'd need two non mods to help maybe 3.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Feb 27, 2023 at 2:36
  • @JourneymanGeek: Do you know whether that flag was cleared before or after trejder self-deleted the post?
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Mar 1, 2023 at 19:19
  • Timeline says a mod rejected the flag before OP deleted. I can probably ping the mod to confirm
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Mar 1, 2023 at 20:02
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    Looks like the bug is they have both "Flagged as spam" and "Deleted" events in the same post notice, assuming it's always done by Community or a moderator, which is true for like 99% of the cases. Your case is extremely rare edge case, but yeah should be fixed by having this separated.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Mar 2, 2023 at 14:55
  • Looks like I was wrong in my original statement that author deletion marks pending spam or abuse flags as helpful. They're specifically exempted and such flags will continue to remain pending. (Correction to my first comment.)
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Apr 6, 2023 at 20:31

1 Answer 1

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You can't flag your own post except for moderator attention. This is because of another user's flag.

This is what happens when there's even a single spam or rude flag that hasn't been cleared on a post when it's deleted. These flags can be cast by users with as little as 15 reputation, so sometimes they are misused — but in my experience it's pretty rare. (Assuming there are no upvotes on the question, it can't have been flagged more than twice as such since each red flag causes an automatic downvote. It's quite likely it was just a single red flag and a regular downvote.)

Normally (assuming the flag is invalid) a moderator will see the pending flag and clear it (removing the downvote and other effects) but deleting the post marked the flag as helpful before they could. You can flag the post to ask a moderator to clear the flag even though the post was deleted. (However, you have too much rep on that site to be affected by any of the real consequences of a red flag, such as rate limiting.)

See also What are the “spam” and “rude or abusive” (offensive) flags, and how do they work?

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  • Well, a single helpful spam/abuse flag will on its own trigger the masked body and title. However, the other effects - in this case, the statement in the deletion notice that it was deleted as spam or offensive as well as the lack of a URL slug for the question - are only supposed to be triggered if the question was actually deleted as such, by either six normal user flags or a single flag from a moderator. As I state in my previous comment and the answer I linked there, any deleted question that has a helpful red flag and which also happens to be locked will trigger that notice.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Feb 26, 2023 at 23:45
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    Also worth noting that the normal deletion notice will check for the post author and display it as "deleted by the post author" (provided they haven't deleted their account), whereas the post notice in the screenshot still shows a username despite the author's account still existing.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Feb 26, 2023 at 23:46
  • Even, if the flow (process) is correct then showing a message that I have marked this post as rude seems wrong. "It was flagged as spam or offensive (...) by trejder". Right?
    – trejder
    Commented Mar 2, 2023 at 14:21
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    @trejder From the comments above and my own searching I think it's a bug that it shows that it was "flagged as spam" in the banner (as JG said there was no active flag when it was deleted!). But I'm right that the two parts of that message are separate, since I've seen people vote to delete spam answers without flagging and they're listed in the "deleted by" list. Even with regular spam, Community is the one deleting but it didn't actually flag the post.
    – Laurel
    Commented Mar 2, 2023 at 15:20

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