13 days ago I flagged this answer for the "not an answer" reason. This got disputed.
I asked in the chat about it and I was told by a moderator (I can't recall who it was exactly) that it probably got disputed because after all it did attempt to answer the question.
He advised me to flag it as "Very Low Quality" instead. Since it already had upvotes at that point, I had to make do with a custom flag message:
It's just links to the docs. Can't flag for 'Very Low Quality' because of an instant upvote.
Today it got reviewed and it got declined for the following reason:
Seems like it works as a standalone answer.
I can't really tell what this is supposed to mean. I see two links to the docs, no excerpt or small example as to how it should be used, it holds a question asking for clarification and there are several better answers instead (disclaimer: one of them is mine).
A quick google only pointed to cases that reinforce my opinion it should have been converted to a comment:
There's this answer by Animuson:
The problem is, there are accepted answers which are low-quality and deserve to be deleted.
and this one by Oded:
I went ahead and converted that answer to a comment, as we would do today if flagged. In particular since there is another, much more detailed and also highly voted answer.
Another post referred to me by hichris123:
In my experience, flagging as Other with an appropriate comment is safer than VLQ (and than Not An Answer for that matter) in cases like that. It just leaves less room for moderator to misunderstand your intent.
So my question: why did this flag get rejected? Is there something about the answer that makes it acceptable after all?
Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are barely more than a link to an external site
?