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in my attempt to review, i discover that the thing that seems to occur most often is that new users with 0/1 reputation are answering questions that have accepted answers and are years old, and the answers say almost exactly what previous answers said, and there is no activity on the question for a long time. often, one of the answers has 10+/50+ upvotes, and still the new user is attempting to add an answer.

it would seem helpful if there were a "duplicate answer to old accepted answer" in the following dialog, because the situation is not that it is not an answer, and not that it is "poorly formatted" (though i suppose it sometimes could be considered a "content problem"). it is really merely that it is adding nothing to the discussion except noise for a question that has an accepted answer and isn't really going to get upvotes since it's really identical to an existing answer.

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  • These don't come up nearly as much as answers that aren't answers at all.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Jul 10, 2012 at 18:15
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    This would be an appropriate time for using "other".
    – Servy
    Jul 10, 2012 at 18:17
  • i do use "other". i'm asking for a 4th alternative, because this is the most comon thing i find myself doing.
    – john.k.doe
    Jul 10, 2012 at 18:18

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After examining the flags that come in every day, I've seen that this isn't anywhere near as common a case as non-answers or the (sometimes abused) flags for very low quality posts. In the last several hundred flags I've handled, only 4-5 of them were for restated answers on older questions. In some cases, these weren't even a real problem, because the new user provided a different take on an existing answer that might still help someone searching for this in the future.

Every option that is added to the flag dialog increases its complexity and makes it slightly harder to use. I'd think that we'd want to reserve new categories for broad classes of flags that occur regularly, and I don't believe this has the frequency to qualify.

It doesn't take that much longer to write a brief description of what you're seeing in the "other" field, and we can act on that as quickly as if it was an explicit type of flag. In fact, providing more information there can better help us see what you might have picked up on so that we don't miss something. In the worst case, for something you see on a regular basis, you can just copy and paste a standard description in the field there to fire off a bunch of these flags for similarly bad content.

Just make sure that what you're flagging is indeed bad content, again because I've seen some examples of rephrased answers that were still worthwhile.

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  • all i'm saying is i see a very large number of posts by users with 1 reputation that ar re-phrases of very old answers. seems like a lot of clutter. perhaps i just need more reputation to the point that i can then recommend to delete answers immediately. and no, it never takes that long to write it up and put it in other. just seems like 3 out of 4 of my reviews come up against this.
    – john.k.doe
    Jul 11, 2012 at 0:46
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Flag such question for moderator attention - they can delete such "late" and unproductive answers and then protect the question so this does not happen again.

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    well, i do flag it for moderator attention, and i usually hit "other", and then type in some text. it just seems i'm entering the same text over and over again: "duplicate of upvoted, accepted answer that hasn't had any real activity for 2/3 years". which is why i want a fourth alternative in that dialog.
    – john.k.doe
    Jul 10, 2012 at 18:17
  • @john.k.doe - For something that is relatively rare. The other options there are for things that are very common. I can think of a few other options I would like to have before this one...
    – Oded
    Jul 10, 2012 at 18:18
  • i guess i find myself doing this 75% of the time when i go through "review".
    – john.k.doe
    Jul 10, 2012 at 18:19

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