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Yesterday, I came across an "answer" that was not an answer, so I flagged it as such. Shortly after, it was edited into an actual answer. The flag was declined with the reason "a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it", which I agree with after the edit.

I am not upset about having a declined flag - it happens to the best of us. I guess what I would like to know is what should happen in this case? It would have been nice to receive a notification that the post was edited, and that my flag might become invalid as a result. Maybe let the moderator know that the flag was for a previous version of the answer.

I realize that this is not a common occurrence, so maybe I should stop over-thinking it and get back to reviewing.

The answer that I flagged is here.

3
  • 1
    This is something that could even be handled automatically by the system without UI changes. All it would really take is to notice that the post has been edited between flagging and declining of the flag and in that case simply not count it at all. I have even seen cases of a flag being declined only to find that I couldn't go back and look at what it was I had apparently flagged for no reason because in the meantime it had been deleted. To this day I am still wondering what content is worthy of deletion but not worthy of a flag.
    – kasperd
    Commented May 2, 2015 at 14:56
  • Hmmm....seems to me that some type of time stamping comparisions could help this type of situation.
    – mdpc
    Commented May 15, 2015 at 7:09
  • It depends on how you define "common". It seems to happen to me every six to eight weeks that I flag a post, the flag is declined, and then a day or two later the post has been deleted.  I presume that this is a matter of one moderator declining my flag, and then a second mod handling a flag from somebody else. Commented Aug 9, 2016 at 3:44

3 Answers 3

23

Maybe let the moderator know that the flag was for a previous version of the answer.

That'd be a nice feature. Currently, what we see is this:

It doesn't show whether a post has been edited, and whether a user has flagged it before it was edited. Ideally, it'd say something like:

not an answer – username, 20 mins ago (post was edited after flag)

If it's easy enough to determine that a post is really an answer from the dialog shown above, then it may happen that your flag is accidentally declined. Because we simply don't check the entire revision history of every post. Don't worry about it too much, though. Like you said, it rarely happens.

1
  • Thanks for the screenshot. That is not what I expected it to look like. So even if I left a comment, I would still be in the same boat.
    – Cfinley
    Commented Apr 30, 2015 at 15:07
7

I realize that this is not a common occurrence, so maybe I should stop over-thinking it and get back to reviewing.

That's pretty much it. A declined flag is no big deal. It's far less of an issue to have declined flags than, say, being the author of bad questions or answers.

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Maybe let the moderator know that the flag was for a previous version of the answer.

As I mentioned here, the new moderator flag dashboard shows an [edited] label if the post has been edited after the flag has been cast:

enter image description here

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