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So I asked this a few days ago: Why was this mod flag denied?

Today, I happened to notice that the non-answer in question has been removed, which makes me feel like I have a black mark against me for no reason.

It also confuses me because now I still don't know whether my flag was correct or not!

Someone please un-confuse me.

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There are a number of comments on the answer to your meta, which dispute the way that flag was handled. Sometimes the community decides that us moderators are doing it wrong and they tell us to do it better next time. We're agents of the community's will, so unless we feel quite strongly, we typically shrug and go "by your command!" and then take whatever action is asked of us.

There's also a half dozen moderators, and each one of us works slightly differently. Some flags would be declined by one mod and acted on by another.

As far as black marks go, don't sweat flag disputes or declines. They have the tiniest meaning in the world. There's a concept called "flag weight" which determines where in the queue of moderator flags your flag will end up, and it has some unknown impact on that (now hidden) value when a flag gets declined. Otherwise, getting a declined flag means very little. The ordering in the queue is pretty pointless - typically when we look at flags we look at all of them, and there's typically good flags all the way down the page.

As long as you get the general concept of when to flag and/or for what reason, you'll be fine. And if I notice someone who is consistently flagging for the wrong reasons, I'll tend to decline with a custom reason that contains a link to a place to understand why.

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  • Thanks agent86, I appreciate your response.
    – shanodin
    Dec 8, 2012 at 13:55
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    To strengthen this, I'd like to point out that the ordering in the queue is important mostly to our big brother, where the amount of flags is supposed to be staggering.
    – Oak
    Dec 8, 2012 at 15:43
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    Although all this is true, the answer appears to have been deleted by the owner, not one of us /cc @AliceRees
    – juan
    Dec 8, 2012 at 16:14
  • @jmfsg Looks like it was deleted from the Low Quality /review queue. If it were deleted by owner or moderator, the "deleted X days ago" line would include that information.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Dec 9, 2012 at 20:18
  • @AnnaLear, why is that anonymous? Shouldn't it list the users that voted to delete?
    – juan
    Dec 9, 2012 at 21:10
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    @jmfsg I agree, but for some reason it doesn't. I'm not at all clear on why. It's on my list of things to check on Soon(TM).
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Dec 9, 2012 at 22:22

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