When should I flag an answer and what flag should I use?

Question

I'm becoming more confused about flagging answers that I believe to not be an answer to a question.

Take this answer for example. I've flagged it as "not an answer" but it was declined, and together with the rest of my declined flags (some of which I'm also confused about), I'm currently banned from flagging any posts. In the example I included, it even appears someone else has determined it to be not an answer (see the comment). In this particular case, the user basically repeated what someone said as a comment to the question, and added that they can report the issue to a bug tracker. Now in my opinion, this is not an answer to the question. It does not inform the user about why his wolves won't stand back up or how to fix it.

What about speculative answers? In this example, I'm not confused about the declination of the flag (in hindsight, I can understand why it was declined), but rather the response I received as to why it was declined. The reason was:

Speculation is technically an issue, although not a very good one. Downvote but don't flag.

What is meant of "speculation is technically an issue?"

It would be great if I could get a better understanding on what flag to use for an answer I don't believe is viable. I've searched around meta for more information, but it seems questions in regards to this nature are specific to the issue at hand, and thus have a different answer.

Answer 1

The first link absolutely qualifies as "an answer". It attempts to answer the question by offering a solution to the stated problem. The fact that it is a relevant attempt to answer the question is enough to count as "an answer".

It does not inform the user about why his wolves won't stand back up or how to fix it.

Clearly, the intention of the answer is that taking the action it describes (breaking the block that the wolf is standing on) would fix the problem.

You should only use the "not an answer" flag for answers that don't even try, like "thanks for helping" or "I'm having this problem too" or "I'm having trouble digging, what can I do?".

If you think the answer is a bad answer because it doesn't completely answer the question, that's a good reason to downvote. If the answer is incorrect, that's a good reason to downvote. If you think that primarily repeating information from a comment is not good enough, that's a good reason to downvote. But none of those is a valid reason to flag the answer.

I can't speak to the response you quote, because I didn't write it.