Declined flag, but accepted in practice

Question

I flagged this answer (> 10k only) for being a link-only answer (using the other flag option) and the flag got declined with the following motivation:

Let's give him a chance to fix it. It's been 3 hours.

While I may agree with the comment, the answer was eventually deleted by a ♦ moderator a few minutes later.

I think it would be fair to change the flag status from declined to helpful.

By the way, in my opinion, this is one of those cases in which being able to comment on a moderator decision would be helpful.

Answer 1

I declined the flags on that post.

Here's why:

When I received the flags on the answer, I noted the following things:

• Three flags were Not an answer (demonstrably false -- it was an answer, just not a very good one)
• Two flags were Link Only Answer discouraged for reasons outlined here and here.
• The user is new at answering. They may have been a member for a year, but they just started answering questions -- it's not unexpected for them to get it wrong.

So, I declined the flags.

When I initially hit decline, I did not see the user's reply in the comments. Later when I left my comment, I saw his comment.

That's not something we see from the moderator queue window. Had I seen the user's comment, I would have marked the flags as helpful and deleted the answer myself.

I left a comment for the user, letting them know why they should improve their answer, and asking them to improve it.

The people who did the right thing and tried to engage the user didn't flag -- that's a good thing. They tried to work it out without resorting to involving moderators first. The people who flagged, didn't engage the user -- they just flagged.

Another moderator came along and subsequently deleted the post. I agree with his actions.

The problem with just marking flags as helpful is that it can encourage behavior we don't want to encourage.

I don't want to encourage users to just create an SEDE query to look at all answers that have http:// and have less than x characters. I can do that. The SE development team can do that -- we don't need users to spend their time on that.

I don't want to encourage users to just flag and flee -- because that doesn't change behavior positively, if anything, it fuels animosity towards an opaque process that from the outside world could be viewed as elitism.

I don't want to encourage you to take every single problem on the site to a moderator -- that doesn't scale. If the community can learn to police itself and to engage with other users instead of dumping that work on the moderators, you'll find that people may respond more positively, and it'll leave moderators to handle the currently 695+ 'other' flags that signify something the community itself believes it can't handle.

Answer 2

For the record, there were quite a few flags on it, and some of them were "Not an Answer"; I'm sure those were the flags that were intended with the decline. We can't unfortunately give individual flag dispositions.

Many of us tend to reserve "Not an Answer" just for posts that were not an attempt to answer the question. That link was an attempt, so the people who flagged that way were not flagging properly.

Answer 3

With decline message "give him a chance to fix it. It's been 3 hours", moderator is likely trying to convince you that the right way to deal with issues in answers like this would be like,

1. Downvote

2. Add a comment explaining issues in the post, like

would you mind explaining more on what it does and why do you recommend it as answering the question asked? "Link-only answers" are not quite welcome at Stack Exchange

3. Wait for a couple of days, get back to the post and either 3.1. undownvote if the issues are fixed or 3.2. flag for mod attention explaining the issues and what you have tried to resolve these

---

A variation of above, when I see that as you explained further, there are already comments from other readers about link-only answers, followed by answerer's reply like "Hey, some help is better than no help, right?", I flag immediately with the message like

This answer looks more like a comment to me because it does not offer much besides a link to external resource. As far as I can tell per discussion in comments, OP is not inclined to expand it with more explanation and context.

Of about hundred or two flags submitted that way (at Programmers), I've got one or maybe two declines (can't remember why) and maybe a handful of helpful flags without further action, the rest were resolved as helpful followed by deletion of the post or by "official" mod comment demanding it to be expanded.

---

_{Taking into account that there are about 24K posts at Stack Overflow clearly telling hundreds thousands of their readers that link-only answers are OK, I would say that approach outlined above sounds laughably ineffective but oh well.}

_{For the sake of completeness, this approach has been proven to work more or less well to me at Programmers, but Programmers is about 100x smaller than Stack Overflow which makes it a whole different game.}

Answer 4

Flags are declined for a number of reasons. Even though it says "declined" and is red, it's not a bad mark on your reputation or anything. Don't worry about it - good flags are declined, but still acted on, all of the time. You are really only in danger if your flags are constantly declined - but there's a threshold (not a sliding scale, like rep).

See:

• https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/195195/191410
• https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/194961/191410
• https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/194309/191410

This post contains some discussion (and links) about how declined flags affect you:
What happened to flag weight?