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As a moderator on a high-activity site I see the "too many answers" Community auto-flag fairly often. This flag (on a question) says:

More than 10 answers posted in the last 7 days

(There's also a 30-answer version. You can probably guess how I know that.)

On our site, it's pretty common for a new question that hits the Hot Network Questions list to get 10 answers in the first day. And that's not a bad thing (for us). When I get one of these flags I page through the answers looking for anything explosive, downvoted answers, deleted answers, and spam. If something stands out I handle it, but usually I end up just dismissing the flag.

What I don't do is try to determine if there are duplicates, or evaluate the quality of not-obviously-bad answers -- not my job. The community needs to take the lead there. And they won't know that there's answer-review work to be done unless they come across the question on their own or somebody brings it up, because they don't see the flag.

Could we do something better with this flag? I think any of the following would be better than what we have now:

  • Don't raise the flag on new questions. They're on the front page and, being new, are more likely to be read. Possible implementation: don't count answers posted within the first 24 hours after the question was asked.

  • Count only answers that are score 0 (-1?) or below.

  • Instead of raising a moderator flag, send these questions to a new review queue, perhaps "Oft-Answered Questions". Some design work is needed here because the question goes to the queue but actions need to be taken on answers.

How can we make this flag more helpful to active communities?

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  • When the same system is used across all sites, it's always going to work well on some than others. I'm a mod on a pretty high-activity site (Science Fiction & Fantasy), and don't remember ever seeing one of these flags. I'm sure there are other sites which hate the "too many edits by post author" flag. Swings and roundabouts.
    – Rand al'Thor
    Jan 23, 2017 at 1:36
  • @randal'thor when you do get this flag, though, what do you do with it? Does it prompt mod activity that's useful to your site? Or is it just "eh, ok"?
    – Monica Cellio
    Jan 23, 2017 at 1:37
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    The most common action I'd imagine taking after a "too many answers" flag would be to protect the question. (Some of the answers might need deleting, but if so I'd probably notice that through flags raised on the answers as well.)
    – Rand al'Thor
    Jan 23, 2017 at 1:45
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    I think a new review queue (with 10+ answers to review and somehow act on... what are the buttons to push?) is a nonstarter... @randal'thor Perhaps it's not so much "activity" as the "everyone is an expert" aspect of some The Workplace questions.
    – user315433
    Jan 23, 2017 at 1:47
  • I wonder how the Stack Overflow mods feel about this
    – Travis
    Jan 23, 2017 at 13:30
  • Can't we just flag ban Community like we would ban a normal bot, and be done with it?
    – John Dvorak
    Jan 23, 2017 at 13:43
  • @JanDvorak I find many of Community's auto-flags helpful on my sites. This one, though, leaves me wondering "yeah, so? what am I supposed to do about that as a moderator?".
    – Monica Cellio
    Jan 23, 2017 at 14:16

2 Answers 2

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There are two relevant settings here: one controls when to raise a flag based on the number of answers, the other controls when to raise a flag based on the number of recent answers.

You're talking about the latter.

These can be adjusted per-site, though currently only Code Golf is customized because it was the outlier when we created this system. If you think you've got another case for adjusting the behavior, post a feature request on the associated meta.

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  • Great; thanks! I didn't realize this was already baked in. What's the definition of "recent"?
    – Monica Cellio
    Jan 24, 2017 at 13:43
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    7 days by default; also configurable.
    – Shog9
    Jan 24, 2017 at 17:33
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If I were adjusting this for sites I moderate I'd lower it to 5 answers. More than that and we likely have a question without sufficiently defined scope on our hands and that's a bad thing. In other words tweaks to this would probably need to be per-site.

On the other hand I don't recall ever even seeing the 10 answer version, so its not doing us much good right now. We do get some posts with that many answers, but it is rare and takes quite a bit of time to accumulate.

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