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I am a 3k user on SO, and so I don't cast very many VLQ flags. However, when a post looks like this:

hello I need to know why my app no worky when I doz dis plees help mee:

<badly formatted code>

thankz in advaancee

And I don't really want to spend ten minutes fixing the post, I will flag it as VLQ, and sometimes NARQ.

Now, I want to know: what actually happens to VLQ flags?

Do they:

  1. Show up in the Diamond queue?
  2. Show up somewhere in the 10k tools?
  3. Go into the Very Low Quality review queue?
  4. Do nothing and aren't seen again?
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4
  • 7
    Yes. Yes. Maybe. No.
    – Daniel Fischer
    May 25 '13 at 15:00
  • 1
    The at the very least go into the Diamond queue. I use it for foreign language posts that I just cannot parse.
    – Martijn Pieters
    May 25 '13 at 15:00
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    @DanielFischer: I don't believe flagging as low quality pushes them into the Low Quality Posts queue. Only the system's calculated quality score causes them to go there.
    – animuson StaffMod
    May 25 '13 at 15:02
  • 1
    Sometimes they get handled in the 10k queue before they pop into the diamond one. (Maybe that's wishful thinking, but it's certainly technically possible)
    – Flexo
    May 25 '13 at 15:02
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The answer to this question has changed since this other answer was posted. Here's how things look in 2017:

  1. Yes (mostly because as explained in point 3, there's no guarantee that the flag will do anything else, and thus diamond moderator intervention may be required). However, there's a 15 minute delay before the diamond moderators see it (60 minutes on Stack Overflow), to avoid wasting their time with issues that the community can fix quickly on their own. (This delay does not exist on meta sites.)
  2. The 10k tools flag queue no longer exists, so this question is no longer relevant.
  3. If a post has never been in the Low Quality Posts queue, then a Very Low Quality flag will send it there (as will a Not an Answer flag). A flag won't send a post back to review if it's already been there. The flag will be marked "disputed" if users in the queue decide the post "Looks OK".
  4. If the flag isn't acted on, it'll stick around until something happens to clear it. (There are lots of ways for flags to be cleared, so this is fairly unlikely, but if the flag does stay around a long time, eventually the number showing in the flag queue will bother the diamond moderators, who'll explicitly mark it as helpful or declined.)
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13

  1. Yes.

  2. Yes.

  3. Posts enter the Low Quality Posts review queue based on different criteria (as mentioned in the comments, based on a score given by the system which, depending on the site, may trigger an automatic flag as well). Raising a VLQ flag does not automatically put a post into the queue as far as I'm aware, but don't take my word for that.

  4. The flags themselves have no effect. They can also be easily disputed with a single edit.

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