Inconsistent flag handling?

Question

One was declined, one was marked "helpful"

This was flagged as not a real question - however, what ended up happening...

audio stopped working sudden in a .avi file - it got closed as too localized, in part because I voted, in part (and this is a guess) because of the flag.

You can't see the entire flag message in the screenshot, but it was this:

duplicate of - https://askubuntu.com/questions/35625/how-do-i-make-unity-remember-which-applications-are-in-the-launcher

And what happened?

Launcher doesn't remember custom icons [Closed as duplicate of The Suggested Question

I'm just pointing those out - and the point of this post is not to be a ranty-ranty-rant-rave, it's more to ask the moderators this:

Can you please figure out how to handle flags consistently? I'm guessing that these were probably handled by different people - however, that's just a guess. Note that I'm not getting up in arms about my flag weight or anything like that - I'm just asking why they were handled... inconsistently with the end result (well, except in the first case)

Answer 1

I think the first one is an interesting case scenario that we haven't seen enough of in the flags to make a judgement on. I've created a new question about how to handle answers with "Link Rot" as this should really be hashed out.

In regards to the next example, the question wasn't closed until almost a month later. While I can't speak for the thought process but this question was closed nearly a month after it was flagged, in fact it wasn't until it was picked up by the Twitter feed that it was handled. Without knowing what the thought process was at that time (since this was before we could provide a "reason") it's hard to ultimately say why it was declined.

Finally, your last example seems like a simple mistake on our part, it was either declined hastily or accidentally as you were correct in identifying the duplication and it wasn't until another community member flagged the post that it was indeed closed.

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Ultimately, you have to take in to account what the question was like at the time of the flag, it may go through several revisions after a flag decline that it becomes apparent the flag was actually correct. Looking over your flag weight and history it would seem very few of your flags have been declined, and the remaining seem to be declined "correctly".