@cocomac what is your opinion... a person goes to the trouble of writing a piece of software to do something on Ubuntu and finds a question on Ask Ubuntu asking for the very thing their software does. Is it bad that they post their software as an answer? Is that really what we mean by spam?
it is kind of a link only answer though
I say kind of, because when the answer is some piece of software and the software can't be in the post, it's an exception to the rule
say the questions asks for a driver... you cannot include a driver in an answer. You can only give a link to download it
the situation here is different... the software is a script, so it could be posted in the answer
but I understand why people post their GitHub links instead. How will you remember to update your Ask Ubuntu post every time you update your script/repo?
so I ask people to consider posting the script if it's short, or at least to post some description of it, and/or the installation and usage instructions
When a flag is declined it kind of counts against the flagger... I am not sure of the exact size of the effect, but there are two things that could be affected: the number of flags per day you are allowed to cast, and getting banned from flagging altogether. It is extremely hard to get banned from flagging. I have had some users roundly abuse flags over a long period of time and still not get banned, but still, there is something 'negative' about declined flags
Disputed flags have a neutral status
in the ancient past before I joined the site there were no review queues and flagging had some additional functions that it has lost, and disputed flags were more common
now you get a disputed flag when you raise a red flag (a spam or rude/abusive flag) and the flag is "cleared" by a mod
this option removes the effect of the flag, i.e. the autodownvote
I would actually have declined your flag if declining red flags removed the autodownvote, but it seemingly does not, so I always "clear" them if I disagree with them, however wrong they are. An advantage of declining flags is that it gives one the opportunity of writing an explanation. The clearing option has no message field
