Incident Report:
Two days ago I checked the mod tools and saw a flagged post appearing. The post was a common happening that a person posts an answer to a rather old question, and in the answer they simply ask a question of their own (often not directly related to the original post).
I agreed that the flag was valid and flagged it again myself. So we have a post flagged by two people.
Several minutes later the flag itself was declined with the reason:
flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention
Several minutes more, and another high-rep. user posted a comment directing the "answerer" to the Ask Question page, and two hours later the post was deleted by three users (I was not one of them due to timing).
What Could Have Happened:
Let us consider a slightly different situation for a moment, something which is not unthinkable, too.
Suppose that whoever flagged the post was a low-reputation user (or even <20k) and the flag was cleared before high ranking users could see it in the moderation tools. This question posted as an answer is in a very wrong place, and I am sure that no one who cares for the well-being of this website would want to allow such content to exist for long.
It happened that at least one of the flagging users were me (and had I not come back to see the post deleted, I would probably have raised a deletion flag myself... which could have been sitting in wait for quite some time). But in our hypothetical scenario none of the involved users - except the moderator who declined the flag - can delete an answer.
In such case, the answer stays in the wrong place for quite some time until someone else deletes it.
Question:
What I wonder about this is whether or not a question posted as an answer to a long-answered thread is not content that the moderators should be aware of.
We had an election recently, and before that such flags were never declined, I assume this is a result of new moderators not being in line with the other moderators, or raising points to other moderators about the job of a moderator.
My question is why was my flag declined? Is there a new description of the moderators job on this site? If there is such, can the moderators please update the common user (and the flagging users) about this description?
(For 10k users: the flagged post.)