I recently hit 500 reputation which opened up the Late Answers and First Posts review queues to me. I took a look through the available items and was presented with this first answer to review.
To be honest it's not a good start, but, it does go on to answer the question. However, having looked at some of the other existing answers on the question, it became clear that while the answer I was reviewing was indeed technically correct, it didn't bring anything new to the table. As such I downvoted it, left a comment and raised a custom moderator flag on the answer.
Based on the discussion here, and from previous experience of raising similar flags on Stack Overflow, I expected that the answer would have been deleted, but the flag was declined:
While this answer is correct, it doesn't really add anything that hasn't already been covered by the other answers which were posted six months ago as it is effectively just re-stating what has already been said.
declined - flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention
Truth be told this has me somewhat confused. I thought that's exactly what I was doing!
My thought process was the following:
- It's not spam
- It's not offensive or abusive
- It definitely is an answer
Which leaves the VLQ flag or a custom flag. Past experience (admittedly on Stack Overflow) has taught me to be extremely wary of using the VLQ flag on answers. Yes, the answer isn't great, but a decent edit could make it passable, and if I ignore the other answers on that question then I don't feel it fits the criteria for a VLQ flag (also bearing in mind that the VLQ queue doesn't show the other answers, so it may not be immediately obvious to the reviewer why that answer popped into the queue in the first place - although granted, I did leave a comment which does go some way to explaining it).
Obviously in this instance it was felt that a custom flag on the answer wasn't necessary, so for future reference, how should I have flagged that answer? Should I have worded the flag differently to make it clear that I felt the answer should be removed?