42

It seems like this shouldn't be able to happen:

Three people flagged a post as "not an answer", but then another user cleaned up the post's formatting, and all the flags got dismissed without anybody actually looking at them. It took weeks for somebody else to flag the post for the fourth time so a mod could actually act on it.

Theoretically the user who edited the post shouldn't have, since it was clearly headed toward deletion, but that shouldn't matter; the flags should stay around until a mod has actually reviewed them.

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    Looks like a bug to me, but being only outside onlooker, might be wrong. – Shadow Wizard Wearing Mask Apr 6 '15 at 7:23
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    I agree: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/265485/… – Brad Larson Apr 6 '15 at 13:22
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    I've also noticed a NAA flag is dismissed when an OP does a delete / undelete. – PeterJ Apr 8 '15 at 15:28
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    Worth noting that this only happens for edits made from review: unlike Very Low Quality flags, edits made outside of review (for instance, edits by the author of the post) don't touch Not an Answer flags. – Shog9 Nov 6 '15 at 22:19
11

I think issues like this are going to be more frequent than before because of recent changes that made comments trigger "grace period reset".

If someone comments on the troublesome post and its notified author attempts to edit something (anything), this triggers new revision and as a side effect all prior NAA / VLQ flags are shaken off.

To account for above, system could raise new mod attention flags like "prior flags dismissed by edit".

Another option is as you suggested, keep prior flags hanging in there until moderator takes a look, but I find it less informative in cases like when link-only answers are edited into a better shape or questions are improved based on feedback given in comments etc.

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    Do we need a re-flag queue? – Deduplicator Sep 5 '15 at 8:58

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