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First of all, I realize there are a lot of "Why was my flag declined?" posts on Meta, so I apologize for asking another one, but I'm more curious as to the answer that I flagged and not the reason it was declined.

Basically, I flagged an answer to This Question on March 26th, last Thursday, and over the weekend, the flag was declined. Today, when I casually checked on my flagging status, I noticed a new section on the right: 

1 declined

This being my first declined flag I was curious what this meant, so I read the comments from the moderator, which were:

declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer

It makes sense, I must've flagged something that I shouldn't have, so I went to see what that answer was, but at some point after the flag was declined, the answer was deleted. Now I'm afraid that I have forgotten the contents of this answer, and since I have less than 10k reputation I'm left in the dark.

Again, this is more of a curiosity issue than a light the fires, grab the pitchforks I did nothing wrong! issue, so if the answer is that there is no way for me to see the contents of the answer I flagged, that would be fine.

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  • The answer says You can add :last-child !important; and you flagged it as low quality meaning it is unsalvageable and should be deleted immediately. Obviously the mod who processed the flag, disagreed and declined your flag.
    – Taryn
    Commented Mar 30, 2015 at 21:30

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The answer was deleted by the owner.

There was a "this is not answer" comment (which is actually wrong, because it is an answer, just a wrong one) and a down-vote so this is probably what prompted the owner to delete the answer.

I wasn't the moderator who handled the flag in this case but I think I know what the moderator who did was thinking.

You actually used the "Very Low Quality" flag, not the "Not An Answer" flag - but in either case the flag should have been declined. It was an attempt at an answer, but it was wrong (did I say that already?). In that case down-vote and move on. Moderators don't need to be involved in cases like this.

I repeat if you see an answer that's wrong down-vote it and move on. Don't flag it. If you do there's a very good chance that your flag will be declined.

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  • That makes sense. I really couldn't remember the contents of the answer, so I had no idea what the flag comments were referring to, but this cleared it up. Thanks again!
    – Tim Lewis
    Commented Mar 30, 2015 at 21:33
  • Is it possible to have a more generic title for this question? had a similar issue and was about to post when I finally found this, just the flag was different.
    – vlizana
    Commented Jul 14, 2020 at 4:32

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