Why was this "unclear what you're asking" flag declined?

Question

I flagged this question on February 25 and now I see my flag has been declined. There is no reason visible in the flagging history on my profile.

I raised that flag because the question appears not to be (effectively) answerable unless the OP provides further information.
Specifically, the behavior described by the OP is:

• likely not related to the shown configuration and errors;
• possibly intended, depending on how they installed their Desktop Environment. The OP stated they installed "Gnome Desktop", but they did not include the package name, nor the exact command they used.

Clear guidelines to this kind of flagging seem hard to find (among the "should be closed" flags, only "off-topic" has its own guide linked in the Help). Nevertheless, my reasoning was inspired by:

• the frequently given reasons for quickly voting to close. In short: inviting the OP to fix their question and preventing low quality answers;
• a few previous flags I raised, e.g. on this question (now closed as unclear) and on this question (still open, but flag marked "helpful").

I'm aware that a declined close flag may be the result of some "leave open" votes, but it looks like I have no way to know if that is what happened.

As far as I know the useful/declined flag counters of each user are not publicly visible, so there is not much reputation (in a broad sense) problem involved here. But still I'd like to improve my comprehension of how U&L works, both to give the best possible contribution and to avoid wasting time on issues that are not generally seen as such. (Actually I have been tempted to flag other questions for the same reason, but I opted for the prudent approach of not doing it too often).

Am I missing something? Is there something wrong in my reasoning?

Answer 1

When you raise an "Unclear what you're asking" flag, that will put the post into the Close Vote review queue. The flag will only be shown to moderators after a delay to give the community the chace to vote. Additionally, mods will often leave those flags to the community since it's something that the community can do.

In this case, the post was reviewed by 4 users, and 3 of them voted to leave it open. Presumably, they felt that the post was indeed answerable. Since the voting was to leave the post open, your flag ended up being rejected. But no moderator was involved in any step of this process.

As for flag stats, you're right, there's no reason to worry. If you have many flags declined, you will get a warning and, eventually, might be banned from flagging for a short period of time. You only have one declined flag, so it's absolutely nothing to worry about. Just keep up the good work!