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I flagged a question as rude because of

Edit: whoever downvoted this question is a [rude part here].

Note: the question wasn't rude as a whole, only this one sentence was.

One of the moderators

  • did the rollback,
  • then left a comment ("be nice" etc.).

I could have done it. I find no joy in telling on people and if I was a moderator I would appreciate users resolving issues by themselves. Now I think me flagging the question may not have been nice to the user nor to the moderator.

On the other hand maybe there were some additional actions taken that were invisible to me (e.g. the user is now one step closer to a ban or something) and if I fixed the issue in private then some mechanisms would not work as intended. Is there anything like that at all that makes involving a moderator a desired action?

Or maybe moderators simply prefer to know what's going on.

Should I handle such situations myself? or should I involve a moderator?

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  • 3
    "Now I think me flagging the question may not have been nice to the user nor to the moderator." - The proper action was taken. We have moderators, to deal with situations like you describe, but since Superuser is moderated by the community saying something yourself would have been appropriate also.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 14:35
  • 2
    I'd make the changes myself to remove them from general visibility, and then flag as well. This way the site is improved quickly, but the Mods are still made aware of someone to keep an eye on. They can see the edit history to confirm error.
    – music2myear
    Commented Jul 3, 2017 at 23:45
  • The better option is to make downvoting not anonymous.
    – Zurechtweiser
    Commented Jul 12, 2017 at 0:05

1 Answer 1

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17

If it is a one-off then feel free to do the needful yourself, but flagging it is not necessarily a bad thing for moderators.

In this case there was not much to see, but sometimes there are a lot of already deleted comments or the user has a history of lashing out.

Flagging gives us a history against the user, comments and questions flagged as offensive can show us a pattern so we know if we need to take more action against the user.

I left a comment as they were relatively new (to our site) and had no real history with us.

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    I wonder what my history looks like? Full disclosure please!! LOL Too bad there's not a query for that in the search function or data explorer. Those would be some interesting stats to see.
    – Vomit IT - Chunky Mess Style
    Commented Jul 4, 2017 at 0:04

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