Flag button makes users wary of asking for moderator attention

Question

The attitude between what Meta says and what the flag hovertext says is conflicting. The flag hovertext says "flag for serious problems" and Meta's attitude is "flag if you need a moderator to take a look at your question or profile"

"Serious problems" has a very negative connotation(which of course tells people not to use it for anything but spam or offensive). Why don't we do away with that or possibly add a new button called "call moderator" or something like that and remove the option to select from "spam" flags and "offensive" flags?

Now I am not saying to get rid of the ability to flag as spam or offensive but rather eliminate the difference between spam and offensive and then break out the "requires moderator attention" into it's own button.

Before I joined Meta and started learning about actual uses of the Moderator Attention flag(noise answers, answers should be comments, a quick way to close your own posts etc) I had never used it because I figured I should only use it for spam or offensive and the Moderator Attention bit is just some way to further describe such a problem.

Answer 1

As Jeff said in the comments of a blog post,

Spam is, well, spam and should be categorized as such. We might use it to train an anti-spam engine at some point, or blacklist the URLs it contains, etc.

So combining the two into one likely won't fly.

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Flagging as spam/offensive covers the vast majority of problems with a post.

Flagging for moderator attention is a last resort for people to get attention, and the only way to get attention for problems that require human intervention (such as an edit war, or for moderator-level tasks such as retagging a locked question).

Even if we on Meta are a bit looser in recommending flagging, users still need to be aware that flags should be used with care: you only get 1 flag (of any kind) per post, and the mod attention flag attributes your message to your user account (spam/offensive flags do not). Not only that, there are a huge number of users on the site and relatively few moderators -- if everyone started flagging for mod attention at the slightest breeze, the mods would be completely overrun with work, which distracts them from the real work they are supposed to do: taking care of the "serious problems."

Answer 2

The "spam" and "offensive" flags are pretty key for letting the site self-manage itself. The worst posts (watches, etc) get very quickly deleted this way, without requiring a ♦ moderator to be passing.

I suppose the hover-caption could be clearer, though...

Answer 3

Wouldn't it be easier to just use a different text for the tooltip? Like:

Flag this post for serious problems or spam, or ask for moderator attention.

(If only to indicate that clicking that link will show some more option, rather than flagging a post right away. Though I doubt anyone would expect flagging to occur without any confirmation.)

Answer 4

Flagging as spam/offensive is completely different from flagging for moderator attention. The former is essentially a type of community vote, with auto-lock/delete. I definitely wouldn't want to remove that option.

I think you're confusing the two. Meta users don't use a different definition of flagging. We just encourage the use of the moderator flag for issues that don't fit into the spam/offensive category, like noise answers ("Thanks, it worked for me!").

Adding another button would just add clutter and confusion IMO. Maybe a line in the FAQ explaining the "Flag for moderator attention" option would help.