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A user posted a terribly bad question which was mostly the word filler spammed to bypass SO question quality algorithms. As I recall, the question received a few downvotes quickly, and the poster responded by vandalizing the post with some very insulting language.

I flagged this immediately as "Rude or abusive," but it seems that a moderator could find no evidence to support my claim and so declined my flag.

I find the poster's response to be incredibly rude and abusive. Am I just too sensitive?

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    Generally, if the rudeness is trivially editable, then that's the better course of action, rather than a flag. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 4:56
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    @VLAZ. Even editing the rudeness, it remains visible in the revision history. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 5:11
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    @VLAZ But isn't editing rather than flagging allowing the rude user to get away with unacceptable behavior? In theory they could continually vandalize their posts, which well meaning users could then edit, ad infinitum, right? I'm assuming that a user who does what the OP linked to should be suspended or banned immediately, but that can only occur if the mods are aware of it. Am I missing something here? Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 6:05
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    @VLAZ You wrote "if the rudeness is trivially editable, then that's the better course of action, rather than a flag" and I challenged, that pointing out that approach was allowing the user to get away with bad behavior. In response you completely ignored the specific issue I raised, and made it personal. Good for you! Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 6:14
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    @skomisa OK, so are you suggesting there is no leeway? Absolutely always flag even extremely minor infractions? If not, then you've not actually challenged me. If you do recommend this course of action, do post an answer I can downvote for being not a good approach. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 6:17
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    The community seems to be kind of split on this: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/416047/… If it is complete defacing of the post like in this case I guess most would agree with the flag, but with instances where only part of the post is edited with such abuse, the moderators and part of the community prefer a simple rollback / edit and denying the flag (This also has to do with the problem that accepting a rude / abusive flag has certain side effects on the post and the author as well) Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 8:13
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    @AbdulAzizBarkat Actually the community seems to have a clear and significant consensus here, as seen by the voting scores in the linked post. +68 on the question, -74 on the reply telling to ignore rudeness and +83 on the answer challenging that one. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 8:49
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    @AbdulAzizBarkat As mentioned in that post, escalate to a CM. Tell them that the mod refuses to take action against blatant CoC violations. But before doing that, post a question on meta so that the mod has a chance to explain themselves. Mods are humans too and can make mistakes. There might also be things going on in the background that normal users don't see. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 8:56
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    @Lundin IMO the moderators are somewhat right in their stance as well, the actual problem is the lack of tooling moderators have when handling the rude / abusive flag. Marking the flag as helpful should not have an implicit effect unless explicitly specified by the moderator. What Stack Overflow (the company) needs to understand is that "Rude / abusive" is a spectrum and most of the users don't read their guidance about the flags, so the flags and their effects need to be designed carefully. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 9:09
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    @OverLordGoldDragon -- Hmm. I never counted, but 86 "F-you-you-fs!" did not feel funny or non-offensive at all to me. It felt like it was an angry outburst directed at the community that was way out of line; it felt both rude and offensive. I can promise you that if I yelled like this at a group in my place of work I would be having a very unpleasant conversation with HR. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 13:27
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    @OverLordGoldDragon So by using that logic we shouldn't ban spammers as long as they are polite... Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 13:33
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    @OverLordGoldDragon You made an argument that it wasn't offensive to post "F you" all over the post and therefore it should just be removed, but we should keep that user around despite them clearly not being interested in contributing to the site in productive ways. How is that different from spam? Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 14:43
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    @OverLordGoldDragon -- I thought that the purpose of the "Rude or abusive" flag was to help remove content and users who are bad for the community. Obviously there is a degree of subjectivity in determining rudeness. I don't understand what "online != in-person" has to do with anything: this is just rude behavior (in my opinion). Whether I personally felt insulted or attacked is immaterial; the flag was about my belief that the post was rude and abusive, not any personal offense. I don't know what "properly insulting" means. Trying to arbitrate how others should feel is slippery. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 15:13
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    @SmellyCat -- edits aren't usually approved by a moderator, but by community members. Once a user achieves a reputation of 2,000 they can edit posts without needing approval; at this point the user can also roll posts back to previous edit states (which is a common way to handle a post that has been defaced by the author of that post). You can also edit your own posts at any time without needing approval. Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 3:54
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    @SmellyCat "edits have to be approved by a moderator" that statement is not true. Edits not by the author of a post need approval but that need not be from a moderator and just needs to be from two users with the edit posts privilege. In this particular case the edit was by by the question author itself so no approval is needed. Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 3:54

1 Answer 1

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Yes, we encourage people to let out their feeli...no, just kidding, this appears to be a flag-handling error.

What happened was, in order:

  1. The user vandalized the post to the extremely rude content you described.
  2. You (and one other person) flagged it (reasonably, in my opinion) as rude or abusive.
  3. Someone else rolled it back to the low-quality-but-not-rude state.
  4. The moderator handled the flags. Presumably1 they didn't notice the intervening edit.

Another moderator has since changed the handling of these flags to "Disputed".

1I'm not the one that handled this, so this is speculation, but...the intervening edit was pretty rude. For those who can't see deleted posts, the post consisted entirely of "**** you you ****s!" 86 times, except with a rude word instead of the asterisks.

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    I’m the offender in question, and this is accurate. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 15:42
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    "Another moderator has since changed the handling of these flags to "Disputed"." Why "disputed" rather than "helpful"? Is there some limitation preventing changing "declined" to "helpful"? Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 8:36
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    @T.J.Crowder yes, it's a system limitation. Normally, a handled flag can't change status. Red flags (spam and R/A) are an exception because validating those flags may impose additional penalties on the account, e.g. -100 reputation, so moderators can "clear" red flags on a post as a means to undo those penalties. Since clearing works on all red flags regardless of the handling outcome, we can use it also to un-decline valid flags, like in this case. The action of clearing red flags automatically sets their status to "Disputed". Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 9:18
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    Thanks @blackgreen. Put it on the long list of system design and implementation issues that will never get fixed (particularly not now)... :-| Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 9:23
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    I do hope that the offending source account was destroyed. Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 13:48
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    It was destroyed, but that does not say whether we'll see new burner accounts from the same person in the future. Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 14:24
  • So……moderators are not aware that posts can be edited? I’d expect this to happen all the time, as some users will flag, other users will edit out the offending content. In other words, shouldn’t the history be the first thing to check if a moderator can not find evidence for the flag’s issue? Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 17:16
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    @Holger Speculating again, my guess would be that the moderator saw the "filler filler filler", assumed that it was being flagged R/A for that, went "that's bad but not a valid reason for an R/A flag", and declined it. You would be surprised how often people raise spam or R/A flags for no discernible reason. That said, some parts of the UI do indicate when a post has been edited since a flag, but not everywhere (especially in userscripts, which are maintained in people's spare time but are nonetheless major time-savers). Yes, we should check; we usually do, but sometimes we mess up. Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 18:21
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    @Holger: Moderators are mere humans handed a crap UI, they're set up to fail. The better UI would be to present them with the state of the post on which the flag was raised -- and note that this doesn't mean at the time the flag was raised, because the user who raised the flag may not have refreshed their page, hence I really mean the state of the post the user who raised the flag was seeing, regardless of subsequent edits or even edit "merges" (due to grace periods). Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 10:18
  • @MatthieuM. that's a good idea actually capturing the state of what's being flagged. Unless it's a comment that doesn't have any revision history (at least publicly); the answer and the question have their own revision history which the URL can be used for moderation. Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 13:41
  • @Mukyuu: The revision history can be lying due to the grace period though. At the very least, editing a post within 5 minutes of posting it just overrides the original revision. Not sure if this grace period also works on later edits (by the same user, obviously). Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 13:43
  • @MatthieuM. True, a grace period could make it tricky. An extreme example is if the user has the right draft in Notepad, but they post a vandalizing post of some sort. When the users flagged that vandalizing post, then OP updated with the right draft from Notepad within grace period it would result in weird interaction I guess. Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 13:47
  • @Mukyuu: Indeed. Probably rare, so I guess pointing at the edit revision is sufficient. But if a "full" capture cannot be down, then revision + timestamp of revision -- assuming the grace period still bumps the timestamp -- would allow knowing that the snapshot one is looking at is different from the one that was flagged, at least. Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 14:44

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