up vote 3 down vote favorite

I flagged this answer as offensive, and then voted to delete it. Then, before the flag was acted on by a mod, other members of the community voted to delete the post, and it was deleted.

Looking at my flagging summary, there is no indication that it was actioned, or marked "helpful" or otherwise, nor did my flag weight increase.

So, what happened? Was my flag automatically deleted when the post was? Did it just not get marked "helpful" for whatever reason?

If the latter, should flagged posts be automatically marked as "helpful" when the post gets deleted (by the mods or the community)?

Very much related, but not a duplicate of http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/109100/im-not-gaining-flag-weight-for-my-spam-flags

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I suspect that the community's deletion of the post constitutes a ratification of your flag, but I don't know for sure. – Isaac Moses♦ Jan 15 at 19:10
If the community acted to delete a post without anybody actually looking at your flag, was the flag helpful? It was correct, but that's different. – Monica Cellio Jan 15 at 19:59
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@Monica. True, but I suspect your reading it more literally than it was meant :) (although I could be wrong). See my next comment also. – HodofHod♦ Jan 15 at 20:49
@HodofHod If something is flagged and then deleted, the flag disappears from the flag queue - there's no longer any need for mod attention. – Isaac Moses♦ Jan 15 at 22:24
@IsaacMoses. Ok, so that answers my question. It gets deleted from the queue and does not get marked "helpful" or contribute to flag weight. Post it as an answer so I can accept it. – HodofHod♦ Jan 15 at 22:36
@HodofHod, I don't know if it affects flag weight or not. – Isaac Moses♦ Jan 15 at 23:39
@IsaacMoses I do. It doesn't affect it one way or the other. V'ha raya, my flag weight is unchanged and the flag, unmarked. – HodofHod♦ Jan 16 at 1:05
@IsaacMoses Hold that thought. I'm posting this as a bug because of several meta.SO posts. – HodofHod♦ Jan 16 at 1:14
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Said bug posting is at meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/697. – msh210♦ Jan 16 at 3:27
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1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted

There was a bug here; it was processing things that were "flagged for moderator attention" (i.e. bespoke messages), but it was not processing the spam/offensive flags. This is because back in the depths of time (before we explicitly tracked flag outcomes), such votes on deleted posts were ignored in the moderator-facing UIs. It looks this didn't get updated to explicitly process the outcomes when the community votes to delete a post.

This has been fixed in the code (and will be deployed next release, usually within a day), and I will try to apply the change retrospectively.

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