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I'm just curious because it relates to another question I have. If 10K users have that privilege, does it really make sense to restrict that privilege to the 13 users here that have attained 10K? Or worse, just the moderators?

It seems that our common goal should be to quickly eliminate posts that go against our purpose here. Surely 5K+ (or even 2K+) users have demonstrated a certain desire to work towards that goal?

Not long ago I flagged an answer that was nothing but, "faggot, faggot, faggot,..." Oh whatever. [flag], bye. Yet, the stupid little troll got to enjoy his twisted little handiwork through several downvotes before his post was deleted.

Why?

If lower rep (2k or 5k) users could just make those posts go away, they would go away all that much faster.

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    The reputation boundaries don't vary across sites on the network. We have relatively few high rep users compared to our traffic, other sites have enough 10K-ers so they don't see such posts stay around for long. I don't know why the boundaries don't vary, probably because it would be lots of work to implement it. Besides, it might be that something like a summary deletion is considered too dangerous, even if most users will use it for legitimate purposes only.
    – rumtscho Mod
    Dec 23, 2013 at 16:43
  • I kind of figured as much.
    – Jolenealaska Mod
    Dec 23, 2013 at 16:44
  • 6 spam/offensive flags will automatically remove such posts. Putting the bar even lower would be dangerous.
    – user6953
    Dec 23, 2013 at 17:04
  • @rumtscho, I've noticed here and on other sites the number of downvotes often exceeds the six auto-delete margin so a lot of people seem to downvote instead of flagging. In blatant cases like this (also considering there was zero useful content) would you have a problem with people leaving a comment such as "Please consider hitting the flag button and marking as offensive"?
    – PeterJ
    Dec 24, 2013 at 8:01

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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As both a comment here and the corresponding privilege wiki point out, almost anyone can flag, and it only takes 3 spam/offensive flags to automatically knock a post off the front page and 6 to automatically delete it.

If some people prefer to waste their reputation points on downvoting these rather than flagging them, that's their call. Please do note that spam/offensive flags result in an automatic downvote; the system ensures that users do not abuse this feature by automatically canceling the flags (and their corresponding downvotes) if the time limit expires without the post being deleted.

So it may appear to you that people are downvoting, when actually they are flagging, and the post is already very near to getting deleted.

Flags are generally a function of views on Stack Exchange sites, so although it may take longer time-wise for the post to be deleted on a (relatively speaking) lower-traffic site like Seasoned Advice, the fact remains that the vast majority of spam and other nonsense is deleted long before the troll has a chance to collect any internet points.

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  • Thank God. We wouldn't want one of those trolls to get a high score.
    – Preston
    Dec 30, 2013 at 4:22

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