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As a moderator I respond to a lot of flags, and when I decline them I try to give good explanations. Most recently, I responded to a flag requesting that a question be deleted by directing the flagger to info on disassociation (no we won't delete that question your coworkers found, but here's something you can do instead). I put care into responding to flags.

I suspect, though, that a lot of people, particularly newer users, never think to click on that "flags" number in their profiles, and so they never see the responses. We shouldn't send notifications for flag responses; that would be way too noisy for a lot of people. But can we add something to the flag dialogue saying something like "check the 'flags' link on your profile, under views, for our response"? This could either be added for everybody (easier) or added until some threshold (number of flags? rep?) is met (harder).

flag dialogue

If it contained a link that'd be even better, but any sort of hint that there will be an answer that he should look for would be an improvement on the "send flags into the void" model that some users have.

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  • 1
    Another pitfall (if I recall correctly): If the user has no helpful flags, the helpful flags link won't appear.
    – Steven V
    Sep 14, 2014 at 19:41
  • @StevenV yes, that's (unfortunately) correct. See this feature request about that. Sep 14, 2014 at 20:30
  • A third pitfall is that users who use SE on mobile devices cannot access the flagging history page at all, no matter how many useful flags they have, except by manually entering the full URL. Sep 15, 2014 at 0:09
  • True, the mobile interface is rather limited in many ways. I don't see how this makes that worse, though -- so while it's a problem, I'm not sure if it's a pitfall of this proposal. Or are you saying that dangling it in front of him if he's on a phone is bad form? Sep 15, 2014 at 1:36
  • Sorry, I didn't mean a pitfall of this proposal—just a pitfall of how flags are handled in general. :-) Actually, though, I disagree that we shouldn't send notifications for flag responses, at least as an option. For a standard close-vote (duplicate, etc.), there's rarely any need; but for moderator attention flags, a notification would be nice. Or just an option for the mod to tick a “Send notifications to flaggers” box when handling the flag. Sep 15, 2014 at 7:58
  • Or just make that line a link to the flag responses.
    – Troyen
    Sep 15, 2014 at 20:14
  • 2
    Related: meta.stackexchange.com/q/239738/162102 Sep 22, 2014 at 14:25
  • 1
    Related: meta.stackexchange.com/q/244030/266359
    – MTL
    Nov 23, 2014 at 2:25

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