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As a fairly new user of this site, I'm still trying to get used to all the various "ins" and "outs" of it.

There was something that grabbed my attention this morning though. I've flagged three posts thus far. I noticed on my profile page there is a display of "helpful" flags. Two of the flags were accepted as the answers were basically spam. The third was rejected.

The third was for the question how-real-are-bear-grylls-tv-shows-ultimate-survival-in-particular. The answer was as follows:

Man Vs Wild, is a ridiculous concept aimed at the very young who only seek entertainment as opposed to valuable information.... who in the world has all those experts available when lost in the woods? MvW shows you how to survive on a full tummy and a fully hydrated body and plenty of sleep, helping with good decision making, as opposed to always being hungry and building a fire, shelter, trapping food. These two shows are complete opposites. There should be no comparison. BTW the amount of risk Bear takes is counter intuitive as a "survival" show.

Now I flagged this as being "not an answer", but it was declined as "flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention".

I'm a little confused by this. Surely if it meets the category of not answering the question, it should be flagged? Or have I misunderstood? I'm not really complaining, so much as trying to understand when/what to flag and how to fit into the community.

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    Hmm, it seems like it does to try answer the question, just in an awful way, which downvotes are for. I agree it's hard to say with this one (and I admittedly haven't read the question in its entirety as I absolutely don't care about it), but an awfully bad and subjectively worded answer still makes for an answer, I guess.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Mar 13, 2014 at 10:42

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I've not had a chance to welcome you to the site - your contributions have been excellent and I'm very pleased to see you here!

I'm going to refer you to my previous post on this kind of subject:

How should moderators respond to 'not an answer' flags?

In the case of a judgement call - I'm going to slightly err on the side on keeping the post. If someone thinks they've attempted to address the question, and I believe this answerer had (by pointing out how ridiculous the series is), then its not my job to remove the post because another person thinks it does not adequately address the question. That is what comments and voting are for.

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    Firstly, thanks for the kind welcome! I'm very glad to be here and be part of the community. As for your answer, that's fair enough. I'll use the comments and voting to address such an incident in future. Thanks for the clear guidance. Mar 13, 2014 at 18:50

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