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I've flagged an answer to moderators attention a few days back, because what I've deemed the appropriate action, couldn't be performed by me.

Note: Meanwhile the question was migrated to http://serverfault.com.

It was about a paragraph that wasn't related with the question, having no meaning on the answer itself, but it would probably be useful as a comment to help future visitors.

The flag was placed and later on declined as can be seen here:

enter image description here

I'm a bit confused about the reason provided:

  1. The action requested could not be performed by me.
    If I was to edit the answer, I could only remove the paragraph. As I can't place it as comment on behalf another user.

  2. The decline reason mentions the "accept rate" ?!? How is this related?

By the comments from this question: Is there a way to discuss a declined flag?, the appropriate action about the action taken on a flag, is to place a question here and allow a discussion on the matter, thus arriving to a conclusion about what happened.

So, why was I "pestering the OP" about my "accept rate" when placing a flag to request an action that couldn't be performed by me the way I did deemed appropriate?

A couple ideas come to mind:

  • The moderator didn't understand my end goal.

  • The moderator justified the reason behind the declining of my flag while believing to be addressing another flag.

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  • Without being able to see the revision history on the answer that was migrated, was the paragraph you wanted moving to comments asking the OP to accept? If so then the flag was declined as you should have just removed the paragraph itself and done nothing else - flags should only be used to indicate problems which require moderator attention. Of couse this is all assuming that this was why you flagged; please disregard if that wasn't it! – Rory Jul 19 '12 at 20:14
  • Moderators are human, too, it's quite possible they pasted the wrong reason into the reply to the flag – Aaron Bertrand Jul 19 '12 at 20:14
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The paragraph you were suggesting should be moved to a comment was

By the way, it wouldn't hurt to accept some answers (not necessarily this one). Check this out.

Removing the paragraph entirely was the correct action to take. No moderator intervention required.

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    OMG! How could I ever have flagged this to moderators attention. A million apologies to the moderator who had to deal with this! – Zuul Jul 19 '12 at 20:20
  • @Zuul No worries. It might have had something to do with the three earlier comments (now deleted) telling the user to work on their accept rate. We used to be a bit more tolerant of these, but now they seem more like pestering than actually useful comments. – Bill the Lizard Jul 19 '12 at 20:25
  • Thanks for the clarification! I'll try to be more careful next time. – Zuul Jul 19 '12 at 20:28
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    @Zuul - the community soon excludes users who won't accept answers. I've tracked/stalked a few users over the past few years watching responses to their questions dwindle to nothing due to low accept rates. This means that the accept rate stat on their user card is working. Comments like "please improve your accept rate" or some other such words is just clutter, if some users just aren't interested in playing ball then hell mend them. – Kev Jul 19 '12 at 23:05
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    @Kev Agreed! My problem that lead to place this question in the first place was the fact that I didn't had access to the review history on that answer, so I was confused as to why did I got a declined justification like that. OTOH, I should have never placed that flag in the first place! Dumbass, I should be sleeping at 3AM instead of being flagging answers :) Lesson Learned. Thank you for the extra input on this matter. – Zuul Jul 19 '12 at 23:29

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