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A low-quality post appeared in the flag queue and I clicked the "flag" button to reinforce it. Only after doing that did I realize that I could just cast a delete vote instead. Mine was the third vote, so that deleted the post. I felt bad about the now-obsolete flag that I couldn't withdraw, and out of curiosity looked at my flag history to see if the system had been smart enough to auto-resolve it.

It did. That's good. It also marked it as helpful.

Should that have happened? It's probably not a big deal (how often does the situation come up, and do we really care about a few "bonus" helpful flags on the way to Deputy and Marshal?), but it seemed odd to have, essentially, resolved my own flag.

I don't think a flag in this case should be declined (there was a problem, after all, and we don't want to mis-train the Community flagger), but perhaps, as with comments that are deleted by their owners before the flag is handled, there should be an intermediate "obsolete" state?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This isn't actually a bad thing. If something is really bad and should be removed faster than the community can handle it, casting a delete vote followed by a flag can help resolve it faster, especially if it's a very low quality or not an answer flag because other 2k users can see it and do something about it.

Your flag was likely marked as helpful because the post was deleted, either by a mod or by other users casting delete votes, so it sounds like your flag was useful!

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  • Thanks. It was actually my delete vote that finished the job, so my flag was superfluous, but see the general reasoning now (and there's certainly no point in special-casing that code!). Thanks.
    – Monica Cellio
    Jul 25, 2013 at 17:34
  • You may have found a bug then. That happens to me a lot on MSO. If I flag something and then cast a delete vote, my flag is ignored, but if I cast the first or second delete vote and then flag, if someone else comes along and finishes the job my flag is marked helpful.
    – jmort253
    Jul 25, 2013 at 17:37
  • In that scenario I think your flag is helpful, so it should be marked that way. Maybe what I found is a bug; maybe it's not. I tagged it "support", which I guess is an entry point to either "discussion" or "bug", depending. :-)
    – Monica Cellio
    Jul 25, 2013 at 18:03
  • If your delete vote finished the job then there's no reason to flag, unless that reason is to make mods aware of a situation. Otherwise, it would be noise at that point. I'll check the flag history later and see what the snapshot looks like so I'm not just speculating. :) Thank you!
    – jmort253
    Jul 25, 2013 at 19:15

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