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I posted this question. Then because nobody answered I continued debugging and eventually found the answer. For future purposes for other people I put the solution in the answer box. Then someone quickly came and just copied my answer and put it there as well. I notified him that he just copied my answer. Then he just replied back that it's not right that I answered my own question because I need to give chance to other users to build up reputation. So according to him I should just remove my answer, accept the answer he stole from me. I think this is not only wrong but rude and arrogant as well. I spend a long time finding out the solution and he just claims it for himself. I think it's just stealing.

You can see this conversation if you have the ability to view deleted comments at the question since his comments got deleted.

So point #3 (3. Educate the OP) didn't work. Then I proceeded to point #2 (2. Edit or flag) So I flagged the answer, this didn't work as well. It even got upvoted by someone. So what should I do now? His answer is still there (8 hours later).

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    You did the next thing you could do, come here and bring attention to the question here on Meta. The answer now received downvotes and delete votes.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Sep 21, 2013 at 13:39
  • The answer is finally deleted. Whoever did it, thank you very much!
    – Michael
    Sep 21, 2013 at 13:40
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    The owner deleted it, but there were at least 2 delete votes on it before the self-delete.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Sep 21, 2013 at 13:40
  • @MartijnPieters that's good. I think answer duplication just to get the reputation are one of the worst things. It's just stealing imho
    – Michael
    Sep 21, 2013 at 13:41
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    Hah! I'm willing to bet the user has a track record of doing similar things.
    – Pekka
    Sep 21, 2013 at 13:42
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    It is also plagiarism and a violation of the CC-wiki license; copying content without attribution should certainly be flagged.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Sep 21, 2013 at 13:44
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    Hmm, there was one more case of plagiarism among the first 10 I checked, but most of his answers come with a lot of effort on his part. Overall, not a bad faith user
    – Pekka
    Sep 21, 2013 at 13:46
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    @notPekka still copying someones answer and saying you should remove the original is really bad. It's like photocopying your fellow student's report and telling him not to submit it because then you can get better grades for himself.
    – Michael
    Sep 21, 2013 at 14:03
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    @Michael I didn't defend that behaviour... just usually when something like this comes up, the user is a completely bad apple with a giant track record of plagiarism, which this one doesn't seem to be. (Except that he left this comment underneath a random answer of mine: he is a fraud gay lol)
    – Pekka
    Sep 21, 2013 at 14:07
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    @notPekka don't worry :) It just specially bothered me because finding out the solution was a lil hassle
    – Michael
    Sep 21, 2013 at 14:13
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    @Michael: That doesn't even surprise me anymore. Reprehensible, sure. But this seems really common among humans. What a pathetic species.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Sep 21, 2013 at 17:01
  • @not Pekka: lol
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Sep 21, 2013 at 17:03
  • I have had a similar thing happen to me in the past. I posted an answer and 1.5 years later someone "answered" the question with a code snippet that does the same exact thing. It doesn't have as many upvotes, but I feel like it adds nothing to the question overall. Question: stackoverflow.com/questions/6540906/…
    – Austyn Mahoney
    Oct 21, 2013 at 20:42

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I think you acted in the proper manner. The reason your flag hadn't been processed right away was pure timing, in that it was cast very early in the morning on a Saturday (U.S. time), and we're always a little lightly staffed then.

One suggestion I would make for the future is that instead of using a "not an answer" flag, which might not have been that easy to parse in this instance, I'd use an other flag and explain what happened. If you tell us that this is an exact copy of your answer, we know to pull up the question and look at the two answers and their timestamps. This is a quick decision for us to make. It also gives us an indication that this might not be the first time someone has plagiarized content, so we can start digging back through their history and warn them if necessary.

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