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Two days ago, I posted this question about why some of my "not an answer" flags have been declined. I read all the comments and understood the reasons and tried to change my method for flagging.

Just a few minutes earlier, I saw this answer. The question is using the C++ programming language. The answer has nothing to do with C++; actually it has nothing to do with programming or answering the question at all. As it seems to me, the author has just copied some part of an HTML page (an incomplete part, even) and just pasted that as an answer. It should be so obvious to anybody that this is not an answer.

But surprisingly the moderator who reviewed my flag thought differently...

My question is, why and how on earth could a moderator consider this as an answer? Or even an attempt to answer?

The reason for declining my flag is:

declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it

Really? No evidence? Does he need any more evidence than the answer itself?

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    That answer shouldn't be deleted; it should be vaporized. – Martin Tournoij Jan 15 '17 at 1:16
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    Moderators do not always look at the question, but just the title of the question. You should not use generic flags for something like this, but instead use a custom flag so you can provide a better description. At a glance, this answer would appear to answer some sort of question, albeit with horrible formatting. Pointing out that it has blatantly nothing to do with the question completely changes what they're looking for. Your comment you left there would've been a much more helpful flag. – animuson Jan 15 '17 at 1:17
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    @animuson Your comment seems to imply that none of the generic flags should ever be used as we can't rely on the people reviewing those flags to actually read the questions. Is that what you mean? – Blackwood Jan 15 '17 at 3:03
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    @Blackwood Not at all. The generic NAA flags are meant for blatantly obvious situations, where users have asked followup questions, just posted a thank you, or otherwise. Stuff that a reasonable person could just look at with no other context and immediately hit the delete button. If the moderator needs to look further into the flag than that, you probably need to use a custom flag and explain in detail why, because chances are it's not immediately obvious. – animuson Jan 15 '17 at 3:05
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    Boy oh boy, whoever declined that wasn't even paying attention. That answer needed to be deleted, even if it was posted to an HTML question. Everyone keeps telling you that NAA flags are meant for "blatantly obvious situations" as if this wasn't a blatantly obvious situation. This is something that "a reasonable person could just look at with no other context and immediately hit the delete button". It is the very definition of such a thing. It is very tiring and concerning to continually see Meta posts where people have flagged obvious garbage, and moderators are unwilling to do their job. – Cody Gray Jan 15 '17 at 10:11
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    @bhargav Are you actually telling me that you needed the title of the question to see that the flagged answer was garbage in need of deletion? Even putting aside topicality, this is unintelligible gibberish, doesn't contain the answer to any question whatsoever, and was clearly copy-pasted from somewhere where it was copyrighted by x_kittykitty_x (which makes it plagiarism, since there's no link to x_kittykitty_x's original content). Sure, the question title would have made it even more obvious, but jeez, if we can only get "I have the same problem" deleted, you all can be replaced by a regex. – Cody Gray Jan 15 '17 at 10:16
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    @CodyGray Please settle down. You can pretend it's blatantly obvious as much as you want, but it really isn't. The last sentence of that looks like a legitimate explanation/answer to a piece of code that a new user wasn't able to figure out how to format properly. Stuff like that gets flagged as VLQ and NAA all the time, so moderators are used to seeing invalid flags like that. Without knowing that it had nothing to do with the question at hand (which is C++), I probably would have declined it too. – animuson Jan 15 '17 at 16:06
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    "Settle down"? I don't know what that is supposed to mean, @animuson. Don't patronize me, I'm not a child. I'm not pretending anything. I'm looking at it out of context and trying to evaluate it as I would if it were flagged. I can't find any redeeming value in that answer whatsoever, and the defense that has been offered strikes me as utterly ludicrous. The last sentence doesn't look like anything legitimate to me. If stuff like this gets flagged as VLQ/NAA "all the time", and moderators aren't deleting it, then that is a serious problem. You also ignored the plagiarism problem. – Cody Gray Jan 15 '17 at 16:10
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    I recognize, of course, that one cannot please everyone. My hope is that the number of people who freak out about very low-quality posts remaining on the site will outnumber the people who freak about these posts getting deleted, and then we can start making some actual headway. I do agree, though, that more descriptive flags are a good solution, and I tend to use them when I flag something. What makes that confusing advice is there have been moderators recently (in Meta comments, don't have a link at the moment) asking for custom flags not to be used because they're much harder to process. – Cody Gray Jan 15 '17 at 16:23
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    Bah. The NAA flag description states that it is for a post that does not attempt to answer the question - that's an inherently context-dependent definition. While I have to concede that @CodyGray is technically wrong to assert that this can be seen to be a non-answer without context (without context, maybe the original question was x_kittykitty_x asking how to fix their HTML code), the real problem here is that giving users an inherently context-dependent flag and then having mods review it without context (even when the post obviously sucks) is an awful process in the first place. – Mark Amery Jan 15 '17 at 16:33
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    Also, once again, this is a problem that could've been avoided if we just stopped passing VLQ and NAA flags on to the diamond mods. That process seems to do nothing but harm. – Mark Amery Jan 15 '17 at 16:36
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    @MarkAmery: I posted a feature request to change the "the" into "any" two years ago. No change so far. – Ilmari Karonen Jan 15 '17 at 22:11
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    The comments here have demonstrated that there is a difference of opinion between users on whether this answer looked like an answer. Users trying to pin it on poor moderation are just playing the blame game. "Omg something I completely disagree with, moderators are getting so lazy!" A moderator didn't catch on to the flag, didn't see the answer in the same light - the user brought more detail to the situation, and the problem got resolved. Moderators are by no means perfect, and I'm sure all the users complaining would make their fair share of mistakes if they were moderating as well. – animuson Jan 16 '17 at 2:00
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    If this ultimately comes down to moderators making wrong decisions because they are missing the context of the answer, then maybe the interface should be changed for them to actually give them some context? Show the tags of the question, show the account age of the post’s author, and other information to give them context (that was that user’s first post and the user has no reputation, so maybe we should consider that the flag might actually be correct and check it with more detail?). – poke Jan 16 '17 at 9:40
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    My neighbor called and said that my border collie had knocked over his trash cans again and scattered food scraps all over the driveway, and would I please come clean it up. I went over and clearly saw the muddy footprints of my terrier and a bunch of paper spilling out of the knocked-over can, so I left the mess the way it was and called my neighbor back to tell him that he was mistaken. – jscs Jan 16 '17 at 15:33
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I declined the flag, because I saw the post in isolation in the flag handling queue. Without context, it looked like any other new user doesn't know how to format so HTML looks messed up answer, but otherwise looked like an attempt to answer, specifically because of the sentence at the end:

deleted answer in question

It didn't look like any of the normal NAA flag reasons. It wasn't asking for clarification, it wasn't thanking anyone, it wasn't a me-too answer, it wasn't asking a new question, etc.

But yes, if I had opened the question, it would have been obvious this was just a piece of garbage littering the page. It is an attempt at answering, albeit the wrong question (what, we'll never know). My apologies.

What happened is that when processing yet another few-100 NAA flags, it isn't always an efficient use of moderator time to open each question page. You can help us be more efficient by flagging garbage like that with a custom flag or leaving a comment underneath the answer (we can expand answer posts to see the comments too).

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    Thank you for the clarification. Actually I wrote a comment, but it was too late and the flag was declined. – EhsanT Jan 16 '17 at 10:05
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    @EhsanT: I saw; it was posted 15 minutes after I reviewed the post, unfortunately. – Martijn Pieters Jan 16 '17 at 10:07
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    it's amazing to me how you guys can remember every flag you handle after hundreds of generic ones – slawekwin Jan 17 '17 at 7:50
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    So, why are these posts presented to you in isolation? That seems strange... – canon Jan 17 '17 at 19:48
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    @canon: all flags are presented in batches of 50. There's a lot of information in the moderator flag queue, and we can click through or load just the post in full (with comments) in the queue page, as well as see more of the question the answer was posted to. The other answers and the full text of the question are not there however. This does make handling a large number of flags efficient. – Martijn Pieters Jan 17 '17 at 19:51
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    @MartijnPieters Would it be an acceptable compromise to show just the title of the question, as opposed to either the whole thing or nothing at all? – duplode Jan 17 '17 at 20:12
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    @duplode: just the title of the question is what we start with. You can reveal the body of the question as needed. – Martijn Pieters Jan 17 '17 at 22:29
  • Oh I see, thanks for clarifying it -- I missed that detail amidst the tangle of comments to the question above. – duplode Jan 18 '17 at 22:14
  • Seems to me that if a custom flag is the only way to get a post actually looked at properly, all the other flag options should be removed – Lightness Races in Orbit Aug 29 '18 at 12:51
  • @LightnessRacesinOrbit: sure, very helpful. Because that option only can be handled by volunteer elected moderators, of which we have an endless supply, right? – Martijn Pieters Aug 29 '18 at 12:55
  • @MartijnPieters Does dripping sarcasm fit the new code of conduct? ;) – Lightness Races in Orbit Aug 29 '18 at 13:09

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