19
I heartily support Emilio's proposal, but to explain why I support it will require a bit of rambling. So please bear with me and I'll try not to make this too painful.
The Physics Stack Exchange has evolved into an educational resource. We hoped it would be a research tool akin to the MathOverflow but for whatever reason that didn't happen. It appears that ...
19
The spam flag is indeed intended only for promotional posts that have very little to do with the topic at hand.
However, utterly meaningless gibberish may well be flagged as rude or abusive. The flag description says
A reasonable person would find this content inappropriate for respectful discourse
and posting something completely devoid of meaning is ...
16
There are a few ways:
If you have >3k rep, you can directly vote to reopen. This will put the question in the reopen review queue.
Once in the reopen review queue, users with >3k rep can vote to reopen. If five users vote to reopen (either through the queue or directly) the question gets reopened. If the question receives enough Leave Closed votes (which I ...
13
OK, there are a couple different things going on here.
Potentially inflammatory posts
It's certainly true that chat bystanders can often tell when a conversation is about to turn nasty. And you're definitely right that it's better to prevent nasty exchanges from breaking out in the first place than to allow them to happen and deal with them afterwards.
...
11
And what would such a flag do? Alert the moderators? What if they lack sufficient expertise in the flagged topic to make a good call? Alert high-rep users? So that they can... criticize the post for you?
Perhaps a better idea would be to just indicate publicly that the post was flagged. We could even maintain a count of the number of such flags, and display ...
11
Oh, hi, that was me. Basically DavidZ has described my reasoning, but I can elaborate a little more specifically about what I had in mind in this case.
I'm not a super-big fan of the "convert to comment" feature. It has its uses, but it's not great for low-content answers from new users without the reputation to comment themselves. I like that the ...
9
What demonstrates a complete rejection of an idea better:
A unilateral decision by a moderator to delete a answer
A hail of downvotes from the community placing the answer deep in negative score territory. (And with questions a hail of downvotes plus a community close.)
Further, given the number of times a week one moderator or another is accused of "doing ...
answered Jun 21 '13 at 17:05
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
82.4k1 gold badge33 silver badges86 bronze badges
9
I agree, the very low quality flag is currently somewhere between useless and horribly confusing. Not only I agree, several posts on meta.SE also agree:
Remove VLQ as a flag option, top answer says should be removed for questions, and renamed just "delete" on answers - which I think would be even more useless, considering we do not delete answers that are ...
9
Should contributions to the community be made compulsory?
Absolutely not. No way. Hell no.
Contributing to this site is done on a volunteer basis. If people want to contribute by writing answers, that's great. If people want to contribute by participating in community moderation and other corpus-curation activities, that's also great. If people want to ...
8
Yep, this has already been proposed here, and it'll be implemented as soon as we have custom close reasons enabled. That might be happening later this week.
Incidentally, the spam flag should only be used for actual spam, by which I mean purely promotional posts with no relevance to the site. Things like
CIALIS VIAGRA PRON xxx.example.com!!!!1!!
OK, I'm ...
8
Absolutely. Flagging is no less useful now than it was before; only the process by which flags are handled has changed.
Let's use this answer as an example:
Could I ask then what is the comparable "blocking" ability of lead, zinc and regular carbon steel (ie steel used in general construction), In simple terms, for example 1mm of lead is the same ...
8
If it's vague, flag/vote to close as Unclear What You're Asking.
If you think it should be closed but none of the canned reasons fit, then flag/vote to close with a custom reason. If five 3k+ users agree with you, then it will get closed. If not, then it will get kicked out of the close-vote review queue and the question likely shouldn't be closed.
If it is ...
8
Note that "spam" is notably missing from the list of flags (VLQ, rude or abusive, not an answer) Shog9 lists in the answer you quote. The spam flag description reads:
Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation.
A gibberish post does not, by any reasonable interpretation, qualify as promoting anything, ...
7
I think this MSO question addresses that. To quote from the top answer:
VLQ means the flagger thinks this post is beyond saving -- no amount of editing or polishing will turn this particular turd into gold. It is a call for a pooper-scooper.
...
Essentially this is synonymous with flag for removal.
For what it's worth, it's quite rare that I ...
7
I want to clarify a few things:
You can still help handle flags, via /review. Yes, lots of other people can do this too - but that doesn't mean they'll do as good a job as you would.
Flag handling has never been the "big" 10K privilege, IMHO. It got a lot of focus, because for a long time it was the only way ordinary users could directly help shoulder the ...
7
I'm not a moderator, but FWIW I found jinawee's comment useful as it linked to an article that was related if not an exact duplicate. I would not want the comment deleted.
dmckee's comment expands on ja72's to point out that special relativity demands any composite object cannot be rigid. This also seems to me to be a useful point and again my view is that ...
7
From the Help Center,
How many flags do I have?
When you start out, you are allotted 10 flags per day. This number may increase to up to 100 flags per day:
You get one bonus flag per 2000 reputation.
You are awarded additional bonus flags when you flag correctly - one bonus flag for every ten net helpful flags (helpful flags minus declined flags).
7
David Z has it right. As a moderator who spends a lot of time moderating chat myself, I'll clear up a few misconceptions:
Flagging
That flag button on the right-hand end of a message? That one is for offensive or inappropriate messages. It's not designed to be used for messages that aren't themselves offensive, but might turn a conversation toxic, because ...
7
Marking a question off topic and migrating it to another site are really two separate actions, although the system is not very good at making that clear. (Some people have been complaining about it for years.)
To mark a question as off topic, from the off topic because... menu, choose Blatantly off topic (or another reason, if it applies).
To notify the ...
7
It's certainly possible, in general, to add extra migration paths. But we only do so when there are really a lot of questions being migrated along that path, enough that it starts to tax the mods' ability to handle them case-by-case, and when the questions being sent there are well received.
Basically, we're trying to avoid the situation where people ...
7
That is not spam.
On StackExchange, only posts that explicity advertise a specific website, program or product are considered spam. Gibberish should be flagged as either "not an answer" or "rude or abusive".
7
I used to be of the opinion that we should keep such low quality answers since it's at least an attempt to answer the question, as misguided as the answer may be.
But after talking with other members and thinking on it more, I have come to realize that these types of not-even-wrong answers should be deleted because leaving them would provide a platform for ...
6
There are two main concerns here:
Migrating questions to beta sites is strongly discouraged. This is mostly because beta sites are still in testing and there is no guarantee that they will succeed. Many of them do, but some (like Theoretical Physics) don't really generate enough traffic, questions, experts, and overall liveliness to make a sustainable ...
6
Flagging bans are described in this post on Meta Stack Exchange.
If at least 25% of your flags from the past 7 days were declined, you're blocked from flagging anything. Depending on when and how those declined flags were cast, this block could last for as little as a day, and won't ever be longer than a week.
So sometime between now and 7 days from now, ...
6
The question asked shows no research effort. It could have been easily solved with minimum research from the side of the user who is asking. But it does not belong to homework-and-exercises tag.
Whether the question deserves the homework-and-exercises tag has nothing to do with whether it should be flagged or closed. So let's leave the tag out of this.
...
6
Non-moderator users have no way to know that their posts have been flagged except by the phenomena associated with the review of such flags, e.g. automatic comments with a "From Review" link at the end.
Moderators can see all flags, even on their own posts, but we consider it good form to not act on such flags and let another moderator handle them.
Their own ...
6
So, story time.
Once upon a time, it used to be that Stack Exchange had this thing called "flag weight", which was basically pretty much the very metric you're interested in, and which was shown to moderators (when they dealt with your flags) as well as publicly (because... reasons?). To put it mildly, it was, um, contentious: people started really caring ...
6
Raise a custom moderator flag on the edited post, and we'll look at it. It's possible for the diamond moderators to remove a user's editing privileges, but we almost never need to do that.
For anonymous edits that introduce spam or vandalize the post, reject them as spam or vandalism. If enough of those rejections accumulate, the IP address associated with ...
5
See also: Why does flag marking as helpful/declined not always correlate with moderator action?
Usually, when the moderator sees a flag and has to think for a while over the flag, reading the post carefully (i.e., the action that should be taken is not immediately obvious), the flag gets marked as "helpful", even if the post doesn't get closed/deleted. "...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
