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So, in the spirit of George's question, I decided to try my hand at flagging comments again, and flagged a comment as "too chatty".

The question I found was non-constructive in my opinion, but someone answered anyways. There are now five comments below the answer, with the last comment being the user asking for links to tutorials.

I flagged the last comment as "too chatty", because I believed it was, but the flag got declined.

So, my question is, when should the "too chatty" flag get used? Is there a specific number of comments? Or is it just "use your best judgement and hope for the best"?

I'm told chattiness is a problem, but my flags are getting declined, so a little guidance would be appreciated.

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    Hi there @LBT, what a nice Meta post you've written up here. I remember flagging a comment as "too chatty" myself a couple of days ago, but I'm just not sure which one it was anymore, so there's no way for me to check up on it I guess. It's funny about those comment flags; it's hard to be sure whether they're really helpful or not, since there's no list of feedback like there is with regular post flags. Maybe I should make a feature request about that. Anyways, good luck with getting some answers to this question!
    – jscs
    May 20, 2013 at 19:28
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    @JoshCaswell too meta even for meta. What I'm saying is, I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym...
    – Kate Gregory
    May 20, 2013 at 19:29
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    @JoshCaswell - I see what you did there
    – LittleBobbyTables - Au Revoir
    May 20, 2013 at 19:30
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    There's a close relationship, maybe even overlap, in my mind between "Not constructive/off topic" and "Too chatty". If we have to make the fine distinction, I'd say it's that the first doesn't have anything to do with the contents of the post at all -- "Nice gravatar", "why r u marking me down" -- whereas the second is tangential but not useful -- like my comment above. However, that's just my own read on it -- I've never been quite clear.
    – jscs
    May 20, 2013 at 19:33
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    meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125541/…
    – user1228
    May 20, 2013 at 19:42
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    Chat invitations are pretty much the only comments I consider too chatty :)
    – CodesInChaos
    May 20, 2013 at 22:27

1 Answer 1

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You're not the only person who was sometimes led astray by the "too chatty" flag. It confused lots of people, so earlier this year SE removed it. There are now three types of flags for comments:

  • rude or abusive
  • no longer needed -- don't get hung up on "no longer"; use this one if it was never needed in the first place (but isn't rude)
  • other -- for things you need to explain to a moderator

The description in the UI for "no longer needed" includes "chatty". Basically, everything you used to flag as "obsolete" or "too chatty" goes here, and things you would have flagged as "not constructive" but not rude also go here.

As a moderator, I see mostly "no longer needed" flags now. I wish we could get some additional clarity about obsolete/no-longer-needed flags, but at least we no longer have to try to navigate "too chatty" vs "not constructive".

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