If you're going to flag for deletion, include a reason

Some people hold personal grudges against other users and try to find any reason at all to flag posts. This has happened with more than a few posts from many different users (some of which where no reason was given).
At least now we can see why posts had been flagged (I do not know why listing the reasons were ever taken away).
It is up to the admins as to what finally happens with this system.

I'd just like to note that somebody has been going through some really, really old (Like over a year) pictures and marking them for deletion. They appear to be perfectly good contributions, and the reason is always just a .

I have no idea if this is where I should be pointing this out or not, but it seems to be relevant to the topic at hand (that apparently being abuse of the deletion/unapproval/whatever system)

alicemaiwaifu said:
Also, I am rather worried about the fact that there are posts which could be deemed 'plausible' for DB. by not breaking the upload rules and not being 'poorly drawn', are being flagged because the flagger did not personally like it.

Perhaps deletion flagging should be more pinpointed to not meeting the DB quality/upload standards? It is rather depressing to see decent posts fly by through the queue merely because it did not personally do it for the individual who flagged it.

But, vandalism aside now, every post is flagged because it subjectively didn't meet the quality standards in the flagger's opinion. Trying to codify that by saying "only bad posts should be flagged" is tautological.

I think what Alicemaiwaifu is saying is that all people on the approval team have two main thresholds when it comes to moderation. There's the "approve-hide" boundary where you decide if something is good enough to approve, and the "flag-keep" boundary where you decide if something is bad enough to purge.

In between the two is a lot of "meh" posts that don't violate any rules and are of marginal to moderate quality. You wouldn't have approved them, but don't think they warrant deletion either.

When we see posts between the two lines flagged in the queue there is a bit of cognitive dissonance because you think, "I definitely don't like it enough re-approve it, but that one probably didn't deserve to be flagged so it shouldn't really be in the queue". There really isn't much someone in that situation can do except leave it to die, or let someone else with different standards re-approve it.

This is probably going to happen no matter what, since different people have different thresholds, and there is certainly no way to codify the lower boundary, since quality is intrinsically subjective and the most important factor. I think Alicemaiwaifu was asking people to reconsider their lower thresholds and adjust them to be more inclusive. As to whether that's a good idea or not, I don't know.

Well, things that are flagged show up with a red border in teh queue. Personally, I tend to take a closer look at them to see if they actually merit flagging. Although I still wouldn't re-approve something that I didn't think belongs here, obviously...

Shinjidude said:
When we see posts between the two lines flagged in the queue there is a bit of cognitive dissonance because you think, "I definitely don't like it enough re-approve it, but that one probably didn't deserve to be flagged so it shouldn't really be in the queue". There really isn't much someone in that situation can do except leave it to die, or let someone else with different standards re-approve it.

Which is exactly what should happen and the entire point of our active approval system. Someone didn't think it good enough to be approved, and you don't either. It's no different from not-approving a post that's in the moderation queue because it was uploaded by someone below contributor. If nobody else thinks it's good enough to stay, it proves the original flagger was right.