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We use flags here in a way which is good given the nature of our site. However, these are different than what other less "subjective" sites use.

I would love to see a flag for the following:

  • Does not add anything unique. We get lots of answers which are effectively smaller versions of other answers which often get hit with "not an answer" or "very low quality." I think these answers are not good for the site and I will continue downvoting them (see here)
  • No justification given. Something to cover the many drive by "here's my thoughts with no explanation" types of answers which don't even come close to satisfying the "back it up" idea. I also downvote many of these, especially short 'comment' answers.
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    I think the whole MSO point should be dropped. Discussing on the child meta about the feasibility of an option is the default starting point for a proposal - so let's focus on what you're trying to propose, and not about the process of pushing it to MSO. – Grace Note♦ Feb 28 '14 at 13:52
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    To clarify, I see many people on meta sites say "This belongs on MSO." Feature requests, bugs, and support posts fit perfectly on child metas, especially if the issues are close to that community. This may also help with the issues y'all are facing with people downvoting your MSO proposals. MSO heavily leans towards SO, and SO is a completely different animal with completely different challenges than what we face. – jmort253 Feb 28 '14 at 14:37
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If the goal is just to add those two specific custom flags, then this is the right place to ask for them. All meta posts are notified to the SE team regardless of which meta they are posted on.

If, on the other hand, you are a member of several communities, and all communities could use custom flags, then posting a request for custom flags as a on meta.so is a great way to involve members of all affected communities and get more eyes on the issue (including some from sites you may not be involved in but who could benefit).

So when I posted Improving the System for Dealing with Poor Answers I wanted to get our community behind the idea. I know that this is an issue for Programmers as well, and gnat has brought that to their attention too. I also know that this is an issue for UX as well, so I will likely re-post at meta.so. Note that our meta post has been referenced on meta.so already, so I think there's a good chance that it will have value posted there.

But adding a couple flags unique to TWP is probably best off being posted here, getting good community support, and then allowing Grace Note and the other Community Managers to pass that along through their channels. As you may recall the community team can work magic in a quick way when needed for individual communities.

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After having spent a week heavily moderating posts to make up for the loss in close voters and delete voters, I'd have to say I'm a major fan of this proposal to include post notices in the workflow and to create a review queue.

More flag reasons may just lead to more burden on moderators, which means more cases of one person making a judgement call on the entire community's behalf as well as more cases of burnout. When these moderation activities are amortized across several users, the burden doesn't fall onto any one single individual, which means the elected moderators can stand at the ready to objectively step in to handle the exceptional cases. I don't mind making the tough calls, but I also know that Stack Exchange definitely works better when the community has the tools to fix problems themselves.

I went ahead and added post notices to posts this week, so here's 42 answers with post notices sorted by newest, so go to the bottom of page 3 for the oldest stuff. The older stuff is easy to delete because it's clear no one is going to fix whatever problems there were.

Depending on how this goes, we can talk more about whether or not this process works and what could make it better.

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    I get them all as one page so your old link wasn't working. I updated it and it seems to work. – jmac Mar 3 '14 at 3:56
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    @jmac - Ah, thanks for clarifying. I was wondering what the heck was going on. :) – jmort253 Mar 3 '14 at 5:26
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    As an aside, one thing I'll ask of our community is to focus NAA flags on questions where the post is either open or where we're actively trying to get it reopened. I pretty much focus on open questions anyway and don't worry so much about closed questions just due to resources, but this flagging feedback should help folks flag more effectively. If a closed question is really that bad, consider flagging for deletion. – jmort253 Mar 3 '14 at 5:28

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