“not an answer” flag went to the wrong place?

Question

To the best of my understanding, "not an answer" flags should send an answer to the "low quality" review queue. Then, if someone disagrees with the flag, it gets "disputed".

An answer I flagged as "not an answer" received "declined - flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention". Which makes sense - "not an answer" doesn't need moderator intervention, it needs to go to the low quality review queue.

Only it seems the answer never got to the "low quality" queue - what I see in that queue's history is that last time anyone reviewed anything in that queue was yesterday.

So what happened?

(Question is similar to this one from 2012, but I'm not sure if flags worked the same way back then.)

Answer 1

To clarify things a bit...

The Not an Answer flags do go into the review queues but after 15 minutes they are also shown to the moderators to review on their flags dashboard. Moderators can actually see them sooner than that if they check a box that says

ignore time filter (some flags are not shown immediately by default)

This is explained in a MSE post here.

If a moderator declines the flag from the flag dashboard, it invalidates the review (assuming it's still pending), which is exactly what happened here. The flag was declined 15 minutes after it was raised, so it did spend those 15 minutes in the review queue but no one reviewed it in that brief period before it came to the attention of one of the moderators.

I will admit that this can be quite confusing if you're not aware of how this works, so I can understand why this happened - and I'll bet that it's happened quite often in the past all over the network.

Let me know if I've missed explaining anything.

Answer 2

I'm not quite sure what happened there. The post went to the review queue and then the review was invalidated. Usually that means there was an edit, but there's no edit in this case. Because it was (briefly) in the queue once, your new flag didn't send it back. It had two delete votes already when I looked at it just now, so I deleted it.