3

The description of the "it is offensive, abusive, or hate speech" flag is this:

This answer contains content that a reasonable person would deem inappropriate for respectful discourse.

However, shog posted that said flag is correct for "someone [who] is abusing the site by posting gibberish." Therefore an answer such as

Me love lorem ipsum. lorem ipsum! lorem ipsum!

fits nicely into "abusive". However, the inline description of this flag remains unclear. I would still be flagging these as spam if it weren't for this answer.

I propose that the wording of this tag is changed:

This answer contains content that a reasonable person would deem inappropriate for respectful discourse, or is irrelevant gibberish.


Notice: irrelevant gibberish is still to be welcomed on meta... if you're a reasonable person.

11

This answer contains content that a reasonable person would deem inappropriate for respectful discourse, or is irrelevant garbage.

If you're twisted up about flagging an answer because you somehow consider irrelevant garbage to be appropriate for respectful discourse, then the last thing I want to do is try to guide you in the direction of the Offensive flag. I mean... Who knows what you do think is inappropriate? For that matter, who knows what you think is garbage? All bets are off at this point - best to steer you away from the sharp objects.

Very Low Quality and Not An Answer both work for this as well; if you're not 100% on the applicability of any flag, just don't use it.

There's no single reason why folks post this stuff; therefore, expecting a one-size-fits-all flag isn't realistic either. This is why we have multiple flag-types, with Spam/Offensive->NAA->VLQ->Other being increasingly general-purpose.

  • 3
    Thus why I considered it spam before, rather than NAA or VLQ. I wouldn't consider gibberish unrespectful; it's not a dig at any other user. And it's also not spam, as you pointed out yourself. – Mooseman Nov 10 '14 at 20:00
  • 3
    In some cases, it actually is spam. As crazy as that sounds, if you've been in the position to see a lot of forum spam you'll tend to recognize the signs of someone "testing the waters". But again, if you don't recognize this then it's best to use a different flag - no harm done. – Shog9 Nov 10 '14 at 20:09
0

Irrelevant garbage should be flagged as "not an answer." Irrelevance isn't offensive, only annoying.

Being abusive to someone is saying things like "You're a stupid idiot, and your father smells of elderberries!," not "flurple finkle!"

  • 6
    "Irrelevance isn't offensive" No, but it's abusive. If that is the case, the flag title should read only "offensive or hate speech". – Mooseman Nov 10 '14 at 19:52
  • 1
    @Moose No it isn't. Who is it abusing? (Being abusive is saying things like "you're a stupid idiot," not "flimble jamble!") – Aza Nov 10 '14 at 19:53
  • Also, the presence of "or is irrelevant garbage" would cause people to start using this for bad answers or ones they disagree with (based on their own personal interpretation of "garbage"). – Brad Larson Nov 10 '14 at 19:53
  • 1
    hmmm @BradLarson how about "nonsensical concatenations of characters"? "dadaistic poetry"? ... – Vogel612's Shadow Nov 10 '14 at 19:55
  • 4
    @Emrakul Apparently, the answer to "who is being abused?" can be "the site". If someone is abusing the site by posting gibberish, flag it as such. – user259867 Nov 10 '14 at 20:23

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243352/can-the-offensive-flag-description-be-reworded
meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-30
136544
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NLAGC7R6X3373DJRAYSFYC5RPPHLL2LM
<urn:uuid:b2258aca-3ea7-4bcf-be8b-217fc5934824>
2019-07-19T02:12:40Z
151.101.129.69
text/html
sha1:W53FSAHTOG5H4USPXGQQZDZL4A7UX3X3
<urn:uuid:595b6833-9ae1-4aa0-bb46-4726f9fa0776>
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/243352/can-the-offensive-flag-description-be-reworded
response
<urn:uuid:87e39537-1af2-4a9b-8267-6d56e41d2b89>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-30
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-232-173-83.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/