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Yesterday, I flagged two posts as "Not answers" but the flags were declined:

In case of the first, two commenters other than me have noted that it is a comment, not an answer.

In case of the second, nobody else has commented, but reading it gives us the following clue:

  • It is not an answer to the question asked, i.e. it is not explaining how the ssh-agent bash and ssh-add works.
  • The word "additionally" at the beginning indicates that it is a comment for this: https://superuser.com/a/284397/477799

Can a mod please reassess and dispatch them?

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  • I think your second flag was incorrect although the answer is in need of being tidied up.
    – Burgi
    Mar 3, 2017 at 10:48
  • It is not an answer. Without the answer above it, it is an aimless piece of text.
    – user477799
    Mar 3, 2017 at 10:58
  • Its also worth adding, there's no way to undo a rejected flag.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Mar 3, 2017 at 11:49

1 Answer 1

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The "not an answer" flag states:

This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question.

The Seagate answer started out saying "this did not work for me, but doing something else did". It may not be a great answer, and it could do with some care, but it is attempting to provide a solution. It might be entirely wrong, or odd, but an attempt was made.

The SSH one is again trying to provide more information that may or may not be useful, it looks like it could be edited into the existing answer but it does give information on what the tools asked about in the question can be used for:

Check your keys with ssh-add -l

You can stop the current ssh-agent session with ssh-agent -k

Something to know about ssh-agent and .bashrc is don't load too many keys. The default number of tries for ssh daemon is limited to 6. This can been modified in /etc/ssh/sshd_config with the MaxAuthTries value.

In this case I think it is half adding to the existing answer, and half adding new uses for the tools requested. If anything the question is too vague.

In both cases the flags were rejected because the answers were trying to provide some kind of solution or help.

Moderators are not the arbiters of what is correct, and you should not be using flags to tell us that you think that something is simply incorrect. If it is not even vaguely an answer, as in it is explicitly trying to talk to another user or about another subject entirely, then that is when you should use the "not an answer" flag. If it is trying to help, but ending up as unintelligible gibberish then flag as very low quality.

If, on the other hand, you believe an answer is simply wrong or unhelpful then you should comment and/or downvote it.

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  • "[...] but it is attempting to provide a solution." This is correct for every single comment (except for vandalism, patent-nonsense and spam). Have you guys ever heard of a threshold?
    – user477799
    Mar 4, 2017 at 6:14
  • "[...] you should not be using flags to tell us that you think that something is simply incorrect." I didn't. I don't. And yet, this is the to-go cliche answer of you guys to everything.
    – user477799
    Mar 4, 2017 at 6:16
  • "If [...] you believe an answer is simply wrong or unhelpful then you should comment and/or downvote it." I don't believe so. For an answer to be wrong, it must an answer in the first place. These two aren't.
    – user477799
    Mar 4, 2017 at 6:17
  • @FleetCommand The moderator who decided your flag must have felt differently
    – Ramhound
    Mar 4, 2017 at 20:08

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