Answer has been edited after being flagged

Question

Someone answered one of my old questions in a way I found very offensive and not helpful at all, and I flagged it appropriately.

Well , nope you can't switch your crew unless you finish your heist then you can:D

Doesn't seem very offensive, does it now?

That's because the poster edited his answer after a while. The original answer looked more like this:

you can all smd , you fucking bitch ass niggaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas

Of course, by the time the author defused his answer, I had already flagged it.

I didn't find out about the edit until an hour later, when I noticed my offensive flag was declined with the following reason:

declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it

I could not believe my eyes at first, until I had a look at the answer a second time, and then I understood why my flag was declined.

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The question is, what happens now?

I now have an additional declined flag in my history, and I'm not quite sure how we're supposed to deal with that answer. For one, it doesn't add anything of value to what's been said before, and even though it's now a valid (albeit bad) answer, it's still offending me even now. Especially now. I feel like that answer is mocking me, as if its author had succeeded in making me look like I'm abusing my priviledges.

Honestly, the situation is pretty disconcerting, and I feel lost right now.

Answer 1

The usual reaction to that kind of first post is account destruction. Even now I'd say that this is still the correct action, the user obviously isn't participating in good faith.

The answer is also redundant, it doesn't add anything that hasn't been said in the existing answers. So I don't see any reason to keep it, given the content of the first revision.

I'd just flag with a custom flag explaining the issue, past revisions aren't all that visible and the moderator likely never saw the old version when declining the flag.

Answer 2

Sorry, this was my bad. One thing that the queue of pending flags doesn't show me, as a mod, is that the answer you'd flagged as offensive had been edited since the flag was cast. So to me, it looked like a bad answer, that maybe would have justified a VLQ flag (I'd've probably marked it helpful with no action taken, if I'm being honest), having an Offensive flag cast for no good reason. So, I declined the flag. This is but one of many reasons that editing out offensive content or spam is a bad idea! Just flag and leave it be!

That said, in this case, the edit wasn't done by an ultimately hellbound third party, but rather, by the same person who posted the original, gratuitous nonsense answer. The appropriate course of action, (as has since been taken), is of course to have it deleted, and on your part, to simply raise a custom flag in which you can explain what happened to the moderator reviewing it in the queue. In general, we don't go poking through the edit history on flags while clearing them out - it'd take too long, and 99.9999999% of the time, yield no information of interest. As for the declined flag on your flag history, don't sweat it. We all have a few, it's not a big deal, and ultimately doesn't mean anything unless you establish a severe pattern of frivolous flags. One mistake - whether on your part, or a moderator's - isn't going to come close to doing that.

Answer 3

One option would be to flag it with a custom flag explaining the situation. A moderator can then decide whether or not to delete it.

My advice, though, would be to just accept it and move on. The question is currently an an acceptable state, so it's unlikely that it will offend anyone else. You have one extra declined flag in a flag history that only you (and maybe moderators) can see, which has a very small effect on your flag weight, and doesn't really matter, otherwise. And it would be hard for anyone to argue that you were "abusing your privileges," when you didn't actually accomplish anything.