Why my flag "the answer has nothing to do with the question" was rejected?

Question

The question: "Is there a way to not select whitespace after a word when double-clicking?

I flagged this answer with "the answer has nothing to do with the question".

I think that is true. The OP asked a way to not select whitespaces after a word on the general use (in Windows systems).

The user said this and I'll quote:

"but this solution for techies to resolve this issue on applications for their users."

Then, it talks about HTML (<div>). It's related to the question (it fits if a user is creating a webpage) but it doesn't answer the original question.

Answer 1

It was declined because that answer was attempting to answer the question, even if tangentially.

It was me that declined the flag but it looks like I fat fingered the decline selection and instead of flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer I hit the generic declined reason.

Your flag was simply "This answer has nothing to do with the question". Upon looking at the answer I could see some quite clear indication that it was indeed something to do with the question and it was attacking the problem from a different angle. Your flag was factually wrong and I declined it as such.

I felt that deleting something that was helpful to someone in the future that might be handling a similar problem was counterproductive.

If an answer is attempting in some way to answer the question then it is an answer. The fact that it is not 100% helpful to the original poster doesn't mean it might not be helpful to another user in future. We want to build a knowledgebase of solutions, that might help everyone with the same answer, not just OP.

If you feel that it is exceedingly low quality then we have a different flag for that.

Otherwise you can simply comment and downvote as necessary. Moderators should not be used to remove content you believe is wrong, the community has sufficient abilities to remove or police content that is just not completely helpful.

Moderators are intended as exception handlers and as such

If you see anything in the system that is evil, weird, or in any way exceptional and deserving of moderator attention for any reason…flag it! That’s the primary job of a moderator: to look at every flagged post, and take action if necessary.

...

A lot of the moderation work is mundane: deleting obvious spam, closing blatantly off-topic questions, and culling some of the worst-rated posts on the site. The ideal moderator does as little as possible, but those little actions may be powerful, visible, and highly concentrated.

None of that page mentions deciding the relative level of wrong-ness needed to delete something that is trying to be helpful in some tangential way.

Answer 2

I don't really agree with the argument that the answer might be helpful to someone, and thus should be preserved. By that reasoning, if I ask "what's two times two?", the answer "5 × 5=25" should be allowed to stay. This is plain counter-productive and even harmful. For example, someone can read the answer in question and then ask

I came across this answer suggesting div tags to improve text selection behavior. So, how do I insert a div tag in Windows?

Having said that, you simply shouldn't expect mods to handle cases which require a judgement call. If you could formulate a hard rule that would disqualify the post from being a valid answer, flagging would be the right thing to do. For example, an answer in a language other than English should be flagged. An answer which has nothing to do with the question would qualify as well, but it would have to be really unrelated, e.g. the question is "what's two times two?" and the answer is "blue". In this case, the answer is somehow related, so it's not up to a mod to decide whether it should be deleted or not, even if I agree that this particular answer is useless.