How are Mod Flags affected by edits?

Question

Now that it is more transparent how the flagging system works from the flagger's perspective (e.g. we have a flag reputation and stats based on our flagging history) it seems important that the system is fair.

With that in mind, what happens when I flag something and then that something gets edited or corrected after-the-fact?

Does my flag go away? (This could be abused by trolls) Do I get penalized for an invalid flag even though my original flag was correct? Do I still get credit if their correction doesn't fix the problem?

Answer 1

The flag doesn't go away: edits don't really count as a moderation action.

Moderators will look at the entire history of a post before deciding what action to take. If they see a flag on a post for a state that's later been corrected via editing (hooray!), it's the general practice to dismiss the flag as helpful without taking any additional action.

When a flag is dismissed as helpful, you still get the flag weight increase even though the moderator didn't intervene.